Orbital-angular-momentum-based reconfigurable optical switching and routing

Orbital angular momentum(OAM) has gained interest due to its potential to increase capacity in optical communication systems as well as an additional domain for reconfigurable networks. This is due to the following:(i) coaxially propagated OAM beams with different charges are mutually orthogonal,(ii) OAM beams can be efficiently multiplexed and demultiplexed, and(iii) OAM charges can be efficiently manipulated. Therefore, multiple data-carrying OAM beams could have the potential capability for reconfigurable optical switching and routing. In this paper, we discuss work involving reconfigurable OAM-based optical add/drop multiplexing, space switching,polarization switching, channel hopping, and multicasting.