Beam Control for Optical Phased Array Transceivers

ABSTRACT: The proposed effort is focused on the development of a novel HEL beam director system prototype composed of an array of small-size densely packed and locked in-phase (phased) fiber collimators, which can be scalable in respect to the number of sub-apertures in the array and the power delivered through a single fiber collimator. In the proposed system the basic operation functions of a HEL weapon system such as target acquisition and tracking, beam pointing and focusing, target hit-spot stabilization at a selected aimpoint and adaptive mitigation of the atmospheric turbulence induced phase aberrations are directly integrated into the fiber array. This development intends to resolve the major technological challenges in the development of fiber-array based laser weapon systems including mitigation of the platform jitter, atmospheric turbulence and speckle effects in laser beam projection onto an extended target and target hit-spot imaging. BENEFIT: The successful completion of the effort will provide a prototype for a scalable optical-phased-array beam director system that will enable the implementation of a new type of compact, light-weight high power laser weapon systems for DOD. The developed fiber-array technology also has direct application to free-space optical communications, active imaging, commercial aircraft defense, and industrial laser technology.