Doctoral Thesis: On-Chip Planar Lens Architectures for Optical Beam Steering
6-120
Josue J. Lopez
Abstract:
Free-space optical beam steering is an important technological capability because of its applications in optical communication links and sensing such as light detection and ranging (lidar). Over the past decade, there has been significant efforts to develop a beam steering architecture that can lead to solid-state lidar with lower size, weight, power consumption, and cost (SWaP-C) while still meeting a high level of sensing performance and reliability. Here in, we present the experimental demonstration of two novel planar lens-based architectures for two-dimensional optical beam steering. The first is an aplanatic lens based on the paraxial approximation. The second is the demonstration of a Luneburg lens that is based on a gradient in the refractive index along the radius of the lens. This second system uses a circularly symmetric grating for uniform emission of an optical beam over a wide field of view. Both devices are fabricated using a wafer-scale fabrication process and pave the way for beam steering with low electronic complexity and a large field of view. Lastly, remaining system architecture challenges for a high performance lidar-on-a-chip system are discussed.
Details
- Date: Friday, April 29
- Time: 2:00 pm
- Location: 6-120
Additional Location Details:
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Marin Soljačić