Wide-Band Optical True-Time Delay and Adaptive Beamforming

摘要

The focus of the research under this ARO DEPSCoR grant is to explore and develop the inherent capabilities of optical coherent transient technology for creating true-time-delays up to several microseconds on signals with wide bandwidths far in excess of a gigahertz on optical waveforms. Coherent transient technology has the advantages that the delays are programmable with amplitude sensitive processing being performed simultaneously. The research effort explores the issues of implementing an optical coherent transient technology in the multi-gigahertz regime and works towards developing an adaptive beamforming system architecture that utilizes optical coherent transient technology. Progress includes development of chirped lasers and linear frequency chirped programming methods on bandwidths of more than 2GHZ, analysis of the continuous programming continuous processing dynamics and spectral filtering effects of the processing material, development of frequency stabilized Ti:Sapphire lasers and diode lasers for use in the evaluations. Also, initial evaluations of the adaptive beamforming architectures were carried out at CU. The thrust of the efforts went into development of multi-GHz OCT technologies, which allows final development of wide-band adaptive beamforming demonstrations.