A metasurface-based full-color circular auto-focusing Airy beam transmitter for stable high-speed underwater wireless optical communications

Junhui Hu; Zeyuan Guo; Jianyang Shi; Xiong Jiang; Qinmiao Chen; Hui Chen; Zhixue He; Qinghai Song; Shumin Xiao; Shaohua Yu; Nan Chi; Chao Shen

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-47105-x

A metasurface-based full-color circular auto-focusing Airy beam transmitter for stable high-speed underwater wireless optical communications

Nat Commun. 2024 Apr 5;15(1):2944. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-47105-x.

Authors

Junhui Hu^#¹, Zeyuan Guo^#², Jianyang Shi¹, Xiong Jiang², Qinmiao Chen², Hui Chen³, Zhixue He³, Qinghai Song^{2

3}, Shumin Xiao^{4

5}, Shaohua Yu^{1

3}, Nan Chi^{6

7}, Chao Shen^{8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
² Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Key Lab of Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Information System, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Optoelectronic Materials and Intelligent Photonic Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China.
³ Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China.
⁴ Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Key Lab of Micro-Nano Optoelectronic Information System, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Semiconductor Optoelectronic Materials and Intelligent Photonic Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China. shumin.xiao@hit.edu.cn.
⁵ Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. shumin.xiao@hit.edu.cn.
⁶ Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. nanchi@fudan.edu.cn.
⁷ Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. nanchi@fudan.edu.cn.
⁸ Key Laboratory for Information Science of Electromagnetic Waves (MoE), School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai, China. chaoshen@fudan.edu.cn.
⁹ Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China. chaoshen@fudan.edu.cn.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Due to its unique intensity distribution, self-acceleration, and beam self-healing properties, Airy beam holds great potential for optical wireless communications in challenging channels, such as underwater environments. As a vital part of 6G wireless network, the Internet of Underwater Things requires high-stability, low-latency, and high-capacity underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC). Currently, the primary challenge of UWOC lies in the prevalent time-varying and complex channel characteristics. Conventional blue Gaussian beam-based systems face difficulties in underwater randomly perturbed links. In this work, we report a full-color circular auto-focusing Airy beams metasurface transmitter for reliable, large-capacity and long-distance UWOC links. The metasurface is designed to exhibits high polarization conversion efficiency over a wide band (440-640 nm), enabling an increased data transmission rate of 91% and reliable 4 K video transmission in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) based UWOC data link. The successful application of this metasurface in challenging UWOC links establishes a foundation for underwater interconnection scenarios in 6G communication.