Liquid crystal optical phased arrays: Practical issues and applications

摘要

Liquid Crystal Optical Phased Arrays (LCOPAs) are exciting, new optical devices that promise to revolutionize a wide variety of optical systems. We review LCOPA device operation and discuss several practical methods for characterizing their performance. Numerical simulations of LCOPA operation together with characterization data from actual devices are used to motivate a discussion of some of the non-ideal behavior observed in LCOPA devices and how these effects impact actual systems applications. We also examine examples of steered imaging systems and a high power laser pointing system that incorporates LCOPAs.