1. AOP has Become a “Go-To” Journal

During graduate school in the 1980s, my research began to involve dielectric waveguides and integrated optics. Relatively short journal papers were important to read in order to know the various research results in the topic area, but I found a different source that was enormously helpful. In the research areas it dealt with, the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ) was a superb source of high-quality articles that were relatively long, contained a fair-amount of detail, captured the current advances of a subfield, had a long reference list, and were ideal for learning a topic. Much of my learning about waveguides ended up coming from several seminal articles in the BSTJ (e.g., [1]). As a young researcher, I knew that the BSTJ was a “go-to” journal (i.e., best place to search), where I could read high-quality material of breadth and depth and be able to cite to the paper with confidence in its legitimacy. The journal has now been dormant for over 20 years, but I always felt the need for such a venue.

When OSA started Advances in Optics and Photonics (AOP), I felt that this new journal could provide the same value as the BSTJ yet cover the wide gamut of exciting fields within optics and photonics. Early on, I served on AOP’s Publications Advisory Board, and it was clear from the start that AOP was headed in the right direction. With an astounding recent ISI impact factor of >20, AOP’s collection of extremely high-quality and relatively long review and tutorial papers serve the scientific community with extraordinary success.

The superb AOP Editors-in-Chief, Drs. Bahaa Saleh and Govind Agrawal, with the expert help of OSA Staff and associate editors, have published articles of significant value to our community. Indeed, the AOP leadership has consistently identified work that has both the most immediate interest and the greatest long-term impact. They excel at achieving a combination of breadth, depth, relevance, and timeliness, and they have established AOP as a new “go-to” journal.

2. My Experience Publishing in AOP

In 2013, I had been working in a relatively new field of using optical beams that carry orbital angular momentum (OAM) for communications. My group at the University of Southern California and several other groups had published a set of papers that together could form a coherent story of advances in this field. I had wanted to write a review article, but I certainly wanted to choose the right venue that would effectively reach the intended audience.

Around the same time, I was asked by Bahaa to consider writing an AOP article toward the end of his tenure. Fairly quickly, it became clear to me that AOP would be the ideal place to publish this not-yet-written review article. I became fully engaged in defining the article structure in discussions with Govind after his tenure began. To them, each article is an individually selected and hand-polished gem. Similar to the way that a book editor deals with an author of an invited book chapter, Bahaa and Govind (along with the staff) dealt with me as a partner of the article: (a) encouraging submission, (b) discussing the coverage and intended audience, and (c) providing constructive suggestions and feedback.

The process of publishing with AOP was straightforward and enjoyable. The editors and staff were extremely helpful, patient, and insightful. I wear it as a badge of honor that I published a paper in AOP in 2015 [2].

That paper now has around 400 ISI Web of Science citations and 600 Google Scholar citations, with the number of citations increasing each year. I believe that this is due, in large part, to the AOP brand as a go-to place for comprehensive, citable, and timely material.

3. The Field Addressed by the Article

The subfield of studying optical beams carrying OAM began in earnest fairly recently. A 1992 paper [3] identified that an optical beam with a helically twisting phasefront and a central intensity null can carry OAM. The amount of OAM is the number of $2\pi$ phase changes in the azimuthal direction of this subset of Laguerre Gaussian beams. The field of OAM has blossomed and grown dramatically in the ensuing years.

AOP has played an important role in the dissemination of authoritative material in this field. The second highest cited paper of AOP is the 2011 review paper by Yao and Padgett [4]. Indeed, I myself have cited this paper numerous times. Our 2015 paper is AOP’s sixth-highest cited paper overall and the highest-cited AOP paper published in 2015 and follows [4] by dealing more specifically with the use of OAM for communications.

The amount of OAM that an optical beam can carry represents an orthogonal modal basis set. Therefore, multiple beams that each carry a different amount of OAM (i.e., residing on a different OAM mode) will be orthogonal such that they can be multiplexed, spatially co-propagate, and be demultiplexed—all with little inherent crosstalk. This enables a system with many orthogonal OAM beams, each carrying an independent data stream to be multiplexed together in a space-division-multiplexed system, which can be more narrowly classified as a mode-division-multiplexed system. Such OAM-based multiplexing has the potential to increase the total capacity and spectral efficiency of a communication system.

The field of communications using OAM has grown dramatically. Figure 1 shows the number of papers published according to Google Scholar that (a) deal with OAM and (b) primarily discuss OAM-based communications, which is the theme of our AOP paper. In 2018, the number of papers was approximately 7000 and 1200, respectively (courtesy G. Xie, formerly of USC). It is clear that our paper appeared during a significant growth spurt in this relatively young field.

 

Figure 1. Number of papers published according to Google Scholar that (a) deal with OAM and (b) primarily focus on OAM for communications. (Courtesy: G. Xie, formerly of USC.)

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Our paper discussed many technical issues, including

In the four years since our paper was published, this subfield has grown significantly. There are numerous groups worldwide engaged in researching many different aspects of using OAM in communication systems.

4. Summary

From beginning to end, the experience I had with publishing an article in AOP was fantastic. The process was a joy, and I was very happy with the end product. I would highly encourage anyone to publish in AOP in the future.

Will OAM be used for communications? Unclear, but promising. There is optimism that OAM could have an impact on future deployed communication systems. Even if not, there is much good research that the community is performing that will likely yield understanding and technologies that could be useful for other important applications.