Fourier transform spectrometers (FTS), mostly working in infrared (IR) or near infrared (NIR) range, provide a variety of chemical or material analysis with high sensitivity and accuracy and are widely used in public safety, environmental monitoring and national border security, such as explosive detection. However, because of being bulky and expensive, they are usually used in test centers and research laboratories. Miniaturized FTS have been developed rapidly in recent years, due to the increasing demands. Using micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) micromirrors to replace the movable mirror in a conventional FTS system becomes a new realm. This paper first introduces the principles and common applications of conventional FTS, and then reviews various MEMS based FTS devices.

In this work, an air-core ring fiber is designed with a record high 1322 orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes at 1550 nm while maintaining radially single-mode condition. Moreover, it can support over 1004 OAM modes across all O, E, S, C, and L bands, exploiting to our knowledge the highest number of OAM modes ever supported in the optical fiber within a wide wavelength range. Simulations show that, across the C and L bands, the fiber with 55-µm air-core radius and 0.45-µm ring width can preserve 3.3 × 10 −3 effective refraction index difference between the two highest-order OAM modes HE 340,1 and EH 271,1. This enables efficient mode separation, and thus achieving stable OAM modes transmission. The effective refractive index differences between the even and odd fiber eigenmodes are also analyzed in the elliptical and bent fibers. We note that higher-order OAM modes are more tolerant to the fiber ellipticity and bending. This ring fiber design has the potential to increase the spectral efficiency and the overall capacity in fiber-based communications system. INDEX TERMS Orbital angular momentum, fiber optics, ring fiber, multiplexing.

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We demonstrate two critical rules of designing photonic lanterns for applications in adaptive spatial mode control: (1) optimized input fiber arrangements to effectively control modes; (2) appropriate input fiber core-cladding ratio to expand the optional range of the output fiber. The 3×1 and 5×1 photonic lanterns according to above design requirements have been fabricated. Using stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm, the phases of the inputs are actively modulated to stabilize the output of novel 5×1 photonic lantern with 30/125 µm output fiber. When the control target is the fundamental mode, the M2 factor of output beam is below 1.2 stably, which will provide a possible technical solution to increase the mode instability threshold in large mode area fiber laser systems. Furthermore, we obtain single orbital angular momentum mode (OAM01 or OAM02 mode) and high order linearly polarized mode (LP11 or LP21 mode) with the purity of the corresponding modes over 0.85 by altering evaluation function, which will be of benefit in optical communication and atomic optics.

We propose and design a hollow As2S3 ring-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with 514 radially fundamental orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes over 360 nm communications bandwidth across all the O, E, S, C, and L bands. The designed PCF with 40 m-radius air core and 150 nm-width As2S3 ring can support eigenmodes up to HE130,1 and EH128,1. The numerical analysis shows that the designed ring PCF has large effective refractive index contrast, and can transmit up to 874 OAM modes near 1.55 m. Simulation results show that in the C and L bands, the PCF with a hollow-core radius of 40 µm and a ring width of 0.15 µm can retain an 2.5×10 -3 effective refractive index difference between the two highest order OAM modes, which achieves effective mode separation, thereby achieving stable OAM mode transmission. The neff difference between the even and odd fiber eigenmodes and the intra-mode walk-off are also carefully studied under different bending radii. The results show that higher-order OAM modes has better tolerance to the fiber bending, compared with the lower-order modes. The fiber has the potential to support ultra-high capacity OAM mode division multiplexing in the optical fiber communication systems.INDEX TERMS Orbital angular momentum, fiber optics, mode division multiplexing, photonic crystal fiber.