The project aims to investigate self-healing optical beams with curved trajectory, using special hybrid optical elements in order to improve free space optical and quantum communications. This type of beam facilitates security and resilience to atmospheric turbulence but also increased information transmission capacity. The major advantage of these optical beams consists in the property of self-healing in the event of encountering an obstacle between the transmission unit and the reception unit - a fact for which the transmitted information is not affected.

The technological challenge consists in manufacturing hybrid optical elements with high optical quality through micro-nanofabrication techniques. These optical elements have the great advantage that passive elements are not influenced by temperature. Within the HYQOM project, the coding, propagation and detection of information transmitted in free space will be analyzed in a compact optical system using self-healing optical beams with curved trajectory. In the second stage of the project, the manufactured hybrid optical elements will be integrated into an optical system that implements a quantum protocol in order to generate a high security optical link.