High-Speed Photonic Lantern Wavefront Sensor

We will develop new cutting-edge concepts on photonic wavefront sensors technology to assess the beam quality of high energy lasers. This includes technologies related to directed energy for actively monitoring the optical beam quality of continuous wave and pulsed high power lasers at 1 micron wavelength operating at multi-kW average power levels. Our approach utilizes a unique photonic solution based on all-fiber photonic lanterns. We will exploit this photonic component to develop an all-fiber wavefront sensor architecture for high-speed optical beam monitoring. The proposed approach will significantly reduce optical alignment risk, size, and weight compared to traditional bulk-optics wavefront sensing schemes. Photonic lanterns transform a complex optical beam pattern into multiple single mode fibers which can be interrogated to detect beam aberrations. The use of these notions for wavefront sensing applications represents a transformational technology for future high energy laser systems.