Development of High Sensitivity, TE-Cooled 2 Micron Wavelength LIDAR Receiver

Current high - performance LIDAR systems are bulky, high power to operate, and expensive. Miniaturization of these LIDAR systems is one of the very important strategies of NASA.nbsp; For long-range satellite based remote sensing high performance LIDAR receiver modules are needed since the signal level is very weak and single photon sensitivity is needed for these applications. Currently, liquid nitrogen cooled LIDAR receivers are planned for these missions and miniaturization of LADAR receiver modules is not critical for these applications. However, LIDAR instruments need to be miniaturized for CubeSats, smallSats, and UAV platforms where power budget and volume are limited. Furthermore, CubeSats are low-cost mission platforms and low-cost LIDAR systems are necessary.The major objective of this proposal is to design and demonstrate a low cost and SWAP high performance LIDAR receiver operating in the SWIR bands for CubeSats, SmallSats, and UAV platforms. We propose to demonstrate a high sensitivity, GHz bandwidthnbsp;TE-cooled LIDAR receivernbsp; operating at 1.5 micro;m and at 2 micro;m wavelengths using low-noise digital alloy AlInAsSb avalanche photodiode detectors.In Phase I we propose to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a 2-micro;m wavelength AlInAsSb digital alloy APD and its receiver up to 5 GHz. In Phase II, we will design and demonstrate an array LIDAR receiver with the NEP lt; 50 fw/rHz at GHz bandwidth at TE-cooled temperatures.