Ultra-Low Bandwidth Encoding and Indexing

Not Available The Holographic Beam Combiner, HBC, proposed here can be used to combine the output from up to 20 lasers into one, single beam with a divergence of 2 mrad. The HBC will operated in the 105 to 1.7 micron region of the spectrum and will obtain high coupling efficiency with the lasers. The HBC will be small, lightweight optical element and it will be inexpensive. The fabrication of the HBC is based on the storage of multiple holographic gratings in the same spatial location. Until now, this has been difficult and inefficient due to material issues. With the advent of polymer with diffusion amplification, PDA, multiple holographic gratings can be efficiently stored in a single location on a holographic plate. Using a large dynamic range, this material can combine 20 holograms with a combined output that has more than 90% of the combined input power. This is the key advantage of this particular holographic material over others. For the purposes of this proposal, information from several different laser beams will be multiplexed as holograms in the PDA material. These multiplexed holograms can then work to redirect or combine the output from the laser beams of the ladar system simultaneously, thereby forming a single, high energy beam. The HBC can also be useful for applications such as channel multiplexing in a fiberoptic network, as well as in laboratory research for combining multiple beams without loss of power.