Sluggish light and its applications in true-time-delay beam forming for wideband RF phased-array antennas

Lu Gao; Sandrine I. Herriot; Kelvin H. Wagner

doi:10.1117/12.716387

6 February 2007 Sluggish light and its applications in true-time-delay beam forming for wideband RF phased-array antennas

Lu Gao, Sandrine I. Herriot, Kelvin H. Wagner

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 6482, Advanced Optical and Quantum Memories and Computing IV; 648205 (2007) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.716387
Event: Integrated Optoelectronic Devices 2007, 2007, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new photonic technique for producing large time delay of radio-frequency (RF) modulated optical signals and its application in a novel true-time-delay (TTD) multiple beam-forming system for wideband RF phased-array antennas using Fourier optics. The RF signal to be delayed is modulated onto a broadband optical carrier in a frequency-mapped manner by an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF). Due to the phased-matched acousto-optic interaction and the moving nature of the acoustic waves in the AOTF, di.erent frequency components of the optical carrier are only modulated and Doppler-shifted by the corresponding frequencies of the modulating RF signal. Heterodyne detection between the modulated optical beam and a timealigned reference beam from the same light source can recover the modulating RF signal. When a small optical path length di.erence is introduced between the heterodyne beams, a large RF time delay magnified by the frequency ratio between the optics and the RF will be generated, which we refer to as the sluggish-light effect. Sluggish light has potential applications in TTD beam forming for wideband RF phased-array antennas and proof-of-concept experiments of the sluggish-light based TTD beam forming for an emulated 2- and 4-channel RF array will be presented in this paper.

Citation Download Citation

Lu Gao, Sandrine I. Herriot, and Kelvin H. Wagner "Sluggish light and its applications in true-time-delay beam forming for wideband RF phased-array antennas", Proc. SPIE 6482, Advanced Optical and Quantum Memories and Computing IV, 648205 (6 February 2007); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.716387

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KEYWORDS

Phased array optics

Modulation

Antennas

Heterodyning

Signal detection

Geometrical optics

Phased arrays

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