Experimental optical computing of complex vector convolution with twisted light

Abstract. Orbital angular momentum (OAM), emerging as an inherently high-dimensional property of photons, has boosted information capacity in optical communications. However, the potential of OAM in optical computing remains almost unexplored. Here, we present a highly efficient optical computing protocol for complex vector convolution with the superposition of high-dimensional OAM eigenmodes. We used two cascaded spatial light modulators to prepare suitable OAM superpositions to encode two complex vectors. Then, a deep-learning strategy is devised to decode the complex OAM spectrum, thus accomplishing the optical convolution task. In our experiment, we succeed in demonstrating 7-, 9-, and 11-dimensional complex vector convolutions, in which an average proximity better than 95% and a mean relative error <6  %   are achieved. Our present scheme can be extended to incorporate other degrees of freedom for a more versatile optical computing in the high-dimensional Hilbert space.