High-resolution, large-angle optical beam scanning methods are sought to meet the ever-increasing demands of free-space laser communication, medical imaging and treatment, printers, scanners, and laser radar. We present a precise steering method with high angular resolution and a wide scanning range. The proposed beam-steering device is also lightweight and compact, which are significant advantages in many applications. The scanning is implemented by means of a pair of diffraction gratings, which can be translated relative to one another, and a tunable-wavelength laser. Thus the beam is steered by the combined effect of two independent mechanisms. The agility of wavelength tuning enhances the performance of a grating-based device, while the sensitivity to chromatic aberrations is minimized by performing the coarse steering with the diffraction grating. The system performance is demonstrated experimentally, and the results are reported. To the best knowledge of the authors, We present for the first time a scanning system that includes a combination of a pair of diffraction gratings and a tunable-wavelength laser.
High resolution, wide range optical beam scanning methods are sought to meet the ever-increasing demands of optical wireless communication, printers, scanners and laser radar. In this paper we present a precise steering method with high angular resolution and a wide scanning range. The proposed beam-steering device is also, lightweight and compact, which are significant advantages in many applications. The scanning is implemented by means of a pair of diffraction gratings, which can be translated relative to one another, and a tunable-wavelength laser. Thus the beam is steered by the combined effect of two independent mechanisms. The agility of wavelength tuning enhances the performance of a grating-based device, while the sensitivity to chromatic aberrations is minimized by performing the coarse steering with the diffraction grating. The system performance is demonstrated experimentally and the results are reported.
In this work we derive a model, which optimizes the performance of a laser satellite communication link with an optical preamplifier in the presence of random jitter in the transmitter-receiver line of sight. The system utilizes a transceiver containing a single telescope with a circulator. The telescope is used for both transmitting and receiving and thus reduces communication terminal dimensions and weight. The optimization model for optimal transmitted power and transceiver gain was derived under the assumption that the dominant noise source was amplifier spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. We investigate the effect of the amplifier spontaneous emission noise on the optimal transmitted power and gain by performing an optimization procedure for various combinations of amplifier gains and noise figures. It was shown that the amplifier noise figure determines the transmitted power needed to achieve the desired BER, but does not affect the transceiver telescope gain. We found in our numerical example that for a BER of 10-9, doubling the amplifier noise figure results in an 80% increase of minimal transmitted power for rms pointing jitter of 0.44 μrad.
The use of a 2-D optical phased array (OPA) steering antenna in microsatellite clusters is very attractive as it is lightweight and compact, and provides agile and inertia-free 2-D beam steering. In this work, we combined OPA theory with optical wireless communication system concepts to achieve a new perspective on potential technologies for microsatellite cluster communication. The optical wireless communication intersatellite link using 2-D integrated OPA steering antenna was modeled. Then we theoretically analyzed the proposed communication system and illustrated the model by a numerical simulation. Taking into account the phasing errors, the antenna's gain distribution statistics were derived from OPA theory by use of the Monte Carlo method. We then applied these results to make a broad analysis of an optical wireless communication system and to investigate the effect of OPA phasing errors on system performance.
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