EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF A NOVEL FREE-SPACE OPTICAL COMMUNICATION-SYSTEM

What is, to our knowledge, a new kind of laser free space communicatio n system is reported. In this system, a laser diode is locked and trac ked at the transmission peak of a Faraday anamolous dispersion optical filter (FADOF) so as to obtain a stabilized lasing. A Zeeman absorpti on FADOF (FADOF/Zeeman) was employed as a stabilized receiver. The ban dwidth of the FADOF/Zeeman is about 1 GHz, which is three times less t han that of the FADOF. The tuning capability is about 1 GHz/0.01 T. We successfully conducted the audio and visual telephone optical communi cation experiment by means of this system in a strong solar background and compared the systematic property of the FADOF/Zeeman receiver and the interference filter (IF) receiver. The results show that the sens ibility of the FADOF/Zeeman receiver is about 25 times higher than tha t of the IF.