Electromagnetic Attack Detector

In this program, Omega Optics proposes to develop a large dynamic range electric field sensor capable of detecting high power electromagnetic pulse. The improvements of the proposed photonic field sensor come from a high speed, highly linear electro-optic (E-O) modulator (spurious free dynamic range (SFDR)>121dB/Hz) based on domain inverted Y-fed directional coupler using advanced E-O polymer materials developed by DARPA MORPH program. The linear modulator with inverted domains, which is developed through a DARPA SBIR program, has an opposite poling direction with respect to each other, and potentially eliminates the nonlinear response of the modulator due to the fact that the higher order spurious signals are cancelled out in each adjacent domain. The bandwidth of the linear modulator can be enhanced to 40GHz because of the velocity match between RF and optical waves. Furthermore, the symmetric waveguide structure of the Y-fed directional coupler will be intrinsically bias-free providing the linear modulator at 3-dB point regardless of the ambient temperature. The specially developed linear modulator, coupled with commercially available optoelectronic components which are evaluated for the proposed photonic field sensor, is expected to reduce the system power consumption by 50% and improve the dynamic range by 20dB when compared with the state-of-the-art commercial photonic sensing technologies using lithium niobate Mach-Zehnder modulator.