Authors: Junhui Hu, Zeyuan Guo, Jianyang Shi, Xiong Jiang, Qinmiao Chen, Hui Chen, Zhixue He, Qinghai Song, Shumin Xiao, Shaohua Yu, Nan Chi, Chao Shen
Published: 2024-04-05
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47105-x
Source: Full article
AbstractDue 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.