2020/11/16 by Maria Solyanik‐Gorgone, Jiachi Ye, Solyanik-Gorgone, Maria +9
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Laser-Matter Interactions and Applications #Optical and Acousto-Optic Technologies #Optics (physics.optics) #Orbital Angular Momentum in Optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2011.08314
openalex publication_date 2020/11/16 · openalex created_date 2022/07/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While information is ubiquitously generated, shared, and analyzed in a\nmodern-day life, there is still some controversy around the ways to asses the\namount and quality of information inside a noisy optical channel. A number of\ntheoretical approaches based on, e.g., conditional Shannon entropy and Fisher\ninformation have been developed, along with some experimental validations. Some\nof these approaches are limited to a certain alphabet, while others tend to\nfall short when considering optical beams with non-trivial structure, such as\nHermite-Gauss, Laguerre-Gauss and other modes with non-trivial structure. Here,\nwe propose a new definition of classical Shannon information via the Wigner\ndistribution function, while respecting the Heisenberg inequality. Following\nthis definition, we calculate the amount of information in a Gaussian,\nHermite-Gaussian, and Laguerre-Gaussian laser modes in juxtaposition and\nexperimentally validate it by reconstruction of the Wigner distribution\nfunction from the intensity distribution of structured laser beams. We\nexperimentally demonstrate the technique that allows to infer field structure\nof the laser beams in singular optics to assess the amount of contained\ninformation. Given the generality, this approach of defining information via\nanalyzing the beam complexity is applicable to laser modes of any topology that\ncan be described by 'well-behaved' functions. Classical Shannon information\ndefined in this way is detached from a particular alphabet, i.e. communication\nscheme, and scales with the structural complexity of the system. Such a synergy\nbetween the Wigner distribution function encompassing the information in both\nreal and reciprocal space, and information being a measure of disorder, can\ncontribute into future coherent detection algorithms and remote sensing.\n