Study On Beam Optimization Method For Optical Waveguide Phased Array

As a new laser scanning technology optical waveguide phased array has advantages of large scan range, fast scanning speed, free addresses, no inertia, small volume and low control voltage and can be applied to many military and civilian fields, such as imaging, radar, display, optical switch and printing. The beam of the optical waveguide phased array is difficult to control for the waveguide coupling and discrepant electrical characteristics of each waveguides. Therefore, the beam optimization of the array plays a very important role for the application.Based on the beam control theory of the optical waveguide phased array, some reasons that affect the beam quality are analyzed. According to the coherent superposition principle, a far-field diffraction model of the uneven output face optical phased array is built to research the optical field characteristics. With the model, the array with a quadratic curved output face is analyzed. The results show that the quadratic curved output face is demonstrable to suppress sidelobes.Optical waveguide phased array beam optimization method is studied. For the problem that the output phase of the array is difficult to be measured directly, a hill-climber algorithm is used to optimize the beam just with its intensity distribution. A beam optimization system is built and a software is developed with Lab VIEW to operate the optimization system. Experiment result shows the optimization system can optimize the beam efficiently.