No Arabic abstract
Light detection and ranging (lidar) has long been used in various applications. Solid-state beam steering mechanisms are needed for robust lidar systems. Here we propose and demonstrate a lidar scheme called Swept Source Lidar that allows us to perform frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) ranging and nonmechanical beam steering simultaneously. Wavelength dispersive elements provide angular beam steering, while a laser frequency is continuously swept by a wideband swept source over its whole tuning bandwidth. Employing a tunable vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser and a 1-axis mechanical beam scanner, three-dimensional point cloud data has been obtained. Swept Source Lidar systems can be flexibly combined with various beam steering elements to realize full solid-state FMCW lidar systems.
We demonstrate an ultrahigh-speed optical coherence tomography (OCT) based on a 100 MHz swept source (SS). An all polarization-maintaining figure-9 mode-locked fiber laser is used as the seed laser. After nonlinear spectral expansion in an Erbium-doped fiber amplifier, a flat top spectrum with respectively 1-dB and 10-dB bandwidths of 73.7 nm and 106 nm is obtained. The broadband femtosecond pulse is time stretched to a swept signal in a section of dispersion compensation fiber with a total dispersion of -84 ps/nm. With the swept source, the axial resolution of the SS-OCT is measured to be 21 um with a 6 dB sensitivity roll-off length of 3 mm. A tomographic image of an encoding disk and a hard disk jointly rotating at 17,000 rpm was acquired by using the SS-OCT with a high imaging quality.
We numerically analyze a delay differential equation model of a short-cavity semiconductor laser with an intracavity frequency swept filter and reveal a complex bifurcation structure responsible for the asymmetry of the output characteristics of this laser. We show that depending on the direction of the frequency sweep of a narrowband filter, there exist two bursting cycles determined by different parts of a continuous-wave solutions branch.
We propose and numerically validate an all-optical scheme to generate optical pulse trains with varying temporal pulse-to-pulse delay and pulse duration. Applying a temporal sinusoidal phase modulation followed by a shaping of the spectral phase enables us to maintain high-quality Gaussian temporal profiles.
In this paper, we present a novel concept for a multi-channel swept source optical coherence tomography (OCT) system based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs). At the core of this concept is a low-loss polarization dependent path routing approach allowing for lower excess loss compared to previously shown PIC-based OCT systems, facilitating a parallelization of measurement units. As a proof of concept for the low-loss path routing, a silicon nitride PIC-based single-channel swept source OCT system operating at 840 nm was implemented and used to acquire in-vivo tomograms of a human retina. The fabrication of the PIC was done via CMOS-compatible plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition to allow future monolithic co-integration with photodiodes and read-out electronics. A performance analysis using the results of the implemented photonic building blocks shows a potential tenfold increase of the acquisition speed for a multi-channel system compared to an ideal lossless single-channel system with the same signal-to-noise ratio.
We demonstrate a blind zone-suppressed and flash-emitting solid-state Lidar based on lens-assisted beam steering (LABS) technology. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, with a design of subwavelength-gap one-dimensional (1D) long-emitter array and multi-wavelength flash beam emitting, the device was measured to have 5%-blind zone suppression, 0.06{deg}/point-deflection step and 4.2 microsecond-scanning speed. In time-of-flight (TOF) ranging experiments, Lidar systems have field of view of 11.3{deg}* 8.1{deg} (normal device) or 0.9{deg}*8.1{deg} (blind-zone suppressed device), far-field number of resolved points of 192 and a detection distance of 10 m. This work demonstrates the possibility that a new integrated beam-steering technology can be implemented in a Lidar without sacrificing other performance.