Photonic Multi-Beam Receive-Only Arrays

We propose to define a dynamically reconfigurable photonics-based system to efficiently collect, down-convert, distribute, and selectively combine the return signals from multiple array elements to a set of digital processors. Electronic signals from the array elements will modulate optical carrier signals. With an appropriate choice of optical carrier signal and photonic architecture, the signals due to one target can be coherently combined while all other signals and noise combine incoherently. Using Compressive sensing one can recover precise position and tracking information of multiple targets from a massive array (40,000-400,000 equivalent elements) that permit the critical target information to be recovered from the processing of a relatively small number of signals