Information encoding by spectral anomalies of spatially coherent light diffracted by an annular aperture

Extensive experimental study is carried out to investigate spectral behavior of spatially polychromatic coherent light diffracted by an annular aperture. It is found that the spectrum at the observation plane exhibits anomalous behavior after passing through the annular aperture. Experimental observations show that at a particular diffraction angle, the diffracted spectrum splits into two halves, while at other diffraction angles the spectrum either shifts towards lower wavelengths (blue-shift) or shifts towards higher wavelengths (red-shift). These spectral changes take place in the vicinity of the dark ring of the Airy pattern. Moreover, the behavior of the spectrum in the Fraunhofer region around a small circular loop centered at a critical direction is also studied and it is found that these spectral changes are qualitatively different from the spectral changes of the spectrum of the focused waves on a circle centered at the singular point. It is discussed in detail that such spectral anomalies of spatially coherent light may be exploited for information encoding and information hiding for free-space communications. The possibility to entangle bits in the spectral anomalies is also proposed. Such technique might be very useful to improve the throughput of information transmission in free space.