Fast quasi-static beam steering via conformally-mapped gratings

Liang Wu; William Maxwell Mellette; Glenn M. Schuster; Joseph E. Ford

doi:10.1117/12.2529460

6 September 2019 Fast quasi-static beam steering via conformally-mapped gratings

Liang Wu, William Maxwell Mellette, Glenn M. Schuster, Joseph E. Ford

Proceedings Volume 11136, Optics and Photonics for Information Processing XIII; 111360W (2019) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2529460
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2019, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Fast beam steering is useful in applications including free space optical switching and communications. Quasi-static beam steering, where the beam rapidly switches between discrete fixed directions, presents special challenges. Here we demonstrate a fast quasi-static ‘pinwheel’ scanner by conformally mapping linear blazed gratings into curved structures fabricated onto annular sections of a rotary disk. We use Matlab and Zemax to model the effects of the conformallymapped grating on the emitted optical beam. We show a specific two-dimensional (2D) ‘pinwheel’ scanner design with 56 gratings, each deflecting 1.31 μm incident light by 11.3° in one of four directions with 75% optical efficiency. The element was fabricated by optical grey-scale lithography on a 95 mm diameter substrate, coated with gold, and mounted onto the spindle of a 3.5” format 7200 rpm magnetic disk drive. We characterize the optical beam steering efficiency, pointing, and stability, and demonstrate microsecond switching speed of a single mode fiber signal.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Liang Wu, William Maxwell Mellette, Glenn M. Schuster, and Joseph E. Ford "Fast quasi-static beam steering via conformally-mapped gratings", Proc. SPIE 11136, Optics and Photonics for Information Processing XIII, 111360W (6 September 2019); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2529460

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