Research Progress of Fiber-based Coherent Polarization Beam Combining for Free-Space Optical Communications in IOE, CAS

Multi-aperture receiver with phased array is an effective approach to overcome the atmospheric turbulence effect on the performance of the fiber-based free-space optical (FSO) communications, where how to combine the multiple beams received by the sub-apertures efficiently is one of the key techniques. In this paper, we report on the research progress of the fiber-based coherent polarization beam combining (CPBC) in IOE, CAS, which is a promising beam combining solution for coherent FSO communications employing the multi-aperture receiver. Phase-locking control and polarization-transforming control were proposed to combine linearly polarized beams with orthogonal polarizations into one linearly polarized beam efficiently, and three fiber-based CPBC schemes were proposed and experimentally validated.