Binary-Phase Spatial Light Filters for Mode-Selective Excitation of Multimode Fibers

In this paper, spatial light modulation is proposed to increase the transmission capacity of graded-index multimode fibers. In the method, selected linearly polarized eigenmodes of the fiber are excited using simple binary-phase spatial filters. Numerical results indicate that the selectivity of the method is very high, also for fibers with perturbed profiles. The excess attenuation of the method is very low. In the experiment, a threefold increase of fiber bandwidth for several filters is obtained.