Joint Communications and Sensing with Beams Carrying Orbital Angular Momentum

Electromagnetic beams carrying Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) open up exciting opportunities for both high-capacity wireless communication and fine-grained sensing at mm-wave and sub-THz frequencies. Their unique helical phase fronts and vortex-shaped profiles enable multiplexing across spatial modes and super-resolution sensing. Yet, simultaneous communication and sensing with OAM beams remained unexplored due to conflicting requirements: communication systems thrive on transmitting multiple orthogonal modes simultaneously, while sensing systems depend on isolating individual modes to extract spatial signatures. In this talk, I will introduce a new paradigm that reconciles these seemingly conflicting requirements by exploiting the inherent flexibility of OAM multiplexing. I will show how reconfiguring subsets of OAM modes can preserve multiplexing gains for communication while generating composite field distributions that encode rich information about the environment. I will also discuss theoretical performance limits and present experimental results at 120GHz. These experiments are conducted by a D-band frequency multiplier chain setup integrated with metasurfaces for phase manipulation, allowing precise generation and control of OAM beams. Our results indicate the potential of achieving both accurate target localization and high-speed data transmission.