Breaking the temporal and frequency congestion of LiDAR by parallel chaos

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Abstract

The rising demand for high scanning accuracy and resolution in sensors for self-driving vehicles has led to the rapid development of parallelization in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technologies. However, for the two major existing LiDAR categories—time-of-flight and frequency-modulated continuous wave—the light sources and measurement principles currently used for parallel detection face severe limitations from time- and frequency-domain congestion, leading to degraded measurement performance and increased system complexity. In this work we introduce a light source—the chaotic microcomb—to overcome this problem. This physical entropy light source exhibits naturally orthogonalized light channels that are immune to any congestion problem. Based on this microcomb state, we demonstrate a new type of LiDAR—parallel chaotic LiDAR—that is interference-free and has a greatly simplified system architecture. Our approach also enables the state-of-the-art ranging performance among parallel LiDARs: millimetre-level ranging accuracy and millimetre-per-second-level velocity resolution. Combining all of these desirable properties, this technology has the potential to reshape the entire LiDAR ecosystem.

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Anomalous collapses of Nares Strait ice arches leads to enhanced export of Arctic sea ice

G. Moore, S. Howell, M. Brady … (2021)

The ice arches that usually develop at the northern and southern ends of Nares Strait play an important role in modulating the export of Arctic Ocean multi-year sea ice. The Arctic Ocean is evolving towards an ice pack that is younger, thinner, and more mobile and the fate of its multi-year ice is becoming of increasing interest. Here, we use sea ice motion retrievals from Sentinel-1 imagery to report on the recent behavior of these ice arches and the associated ice fluxes. We show that the duration of arch formation has decreased over the past 20 years, while the ice area and volume fluxes along Nares Strait have both increased. These results suggest that a transition is underway towards a state where the formation of these arches will become atypical with a concomitant increase in the export of multi-year ice accelerating the transition towards a younger and thinner Arctic ice pack.

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Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators

Michal Lipson, Michael L. Gorodetsky, Tobias Kippenberg … (2018)

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Large-scale nanophotonic phased array.

Jie Sun, Erman Timurdogan, Ami Yaacobi … (2013)

Electromagnetic phased arrays at radio frequencies are well known and have enabled applications ranging from communications to radar, broadcasting and astronomy. The ability to generate arbitrary radiation patterns with large-scale phased arrays has long been pursued. Although it is extremely expensive and cumbersome to deploy large-scale radiofrequency phased arrays, optical phased arrays have a unique advantage in that the much shorter optical wavelength holds promise for large-scale integration. However, the short optical wavelength also imposes stringent requirements on fabrication. As a consequence, although optical phased arrays have been studied with various platforms and recently with chip-scale nanophotonics, all of the demonstrations so far are restricted to one-dimensional or small-scale two-dimensional arrays. Here we report the demonstration of a large-scale two-dimensional nanophotonic phased array (NPA), in which 64 × 64 (4,096) optical nanoantennas are densely integrated on a silicon chip within a footprint of 576 μm × 576 μm with all of the nanoantennas precisely balanced in power and aligned in phase to generate a designed, sophisticated radiation pattern in the far field. We also show that active phase tunability can be realized in the proposed NPA by demonstrating dynamic beam steering and shaping with an 8 × 8 array. This work demonstrates that a robust design, together with state-of-the-art complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology, allows large-scale NPAs to be implemented on compact and inexpensive nanophotonic chips. In turn, this enables arbitrary radiation pattern generation using NPAs and therefore extends the functionalities of phased arrays beyond conventional beam focusing and steering, opening up possibilities for large-scale deployment in applications such as communication, laser detection and ranging, three-dimensional holography and biomedical sciences, to name just a few.