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arXiv · 2606.20004

A unified resource-pool architecture for high-dimensional direct-detection optical communication

Abstract

Increasing optical communication capacity without proportionally increasing receiver complexity remains a key challenge for direct-detection links. Conventional systems typically assign wavelength, polarization and intensity to fixed, separately recovered functions, so that alphabet expansion is accompanied by additional demultiplexing, polarization handling, receiver branches and electronic processing. Here we introduce a unified resource-pool architecture for high-dimensional direct-detection optical communication, in which wavelength, polarization and intensity are jointly organized as a composite optical symbol space and recovered through optical-domain joint projection rather than dimension-by-dimension separation. The receiver is implemented with an integrated disordered photonic processor that transforms each composite optical state into a reproducible multi-output electrical fingerprint for single-shot direct recovery. In a dual-wavelength transmission experiment, the system resolves 4096 composite symbols, corresponding to 12 bits per symbol slot, with a bit error rate of 4.25e-4 after 10 km standard-fiber transmission. Additional experiments demonstrate dense polarization alphabets, wavelength-indexed state-space expansion and high-launch-power operation over hollow-core fiber. These results establish disorder-enabled joint projection in an integrated photonic processor as a route to hardware-efficient high-dimensional direct-detection communication beyond conventional dimension-partitioned receiver architecture.

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Jingze Liu, Zhijuan Gu, Xinyang Yu, Ziwen Zhou, Zhuyixiao Liu, Mingming Zhang, Yuxuan Xiong, Peng Li, Zhongyao Luo1, Jiajie Yuan, Hao Wu, Zhipei Sun, Siqi Yan, Yu Yu, Ming Tang. 2026-06-18. A unified resource-pool architecture for high-dimensional direct-detection optical communication. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20004

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