Ultrafast optical ranging using microresonator soliton frequency combs

By P. Trocha, D. Ganin, Maxim Karpov, Martin Hubert Peter Pfeiffer, A. Kordts, J. Krockenberger, S. Wolf, P. Marin-Palomo, C. Weimann, Sebastian Randel and 3 more. Science, 2017

741 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Miniaturized optical ranging and tracking Light detection and ranging systems are used in many engineering and environmental sensing applications. Their relatively large size and cost, however, tend to be prohibitive for general use in autonomous vehicles and drones. Suh and Vahala and Trocha et al. show that optical frequency combs generated by microresonator devices can be used for precision ranging and the tracking of fast-moving objects. The compact size of the microresonators could broaden the scope for widespread applications, providing a platform for miniaturized laser ranging systems suitable for photonic integration. Science, this issue p. 884, p. 887 Optical microresonators can be used for light detection and ranging as well as tracking fast-moving objects. Light detection and ranging is widely used in science and industry. Over the past decade, optical frequency combs were shown to offer advantages in optical ranging, enabling fast distance acquisition with high accuracy. Driven by emerging high-volume applications such as industrial sensing, drone navigation, or autonomous driving, there is now a growing demand for compact ranging systems. Here, we show that soliton Kerr comb generation in integrated silicon nitride microresonators provides a route to high-performance chip-scale ranging systems. We demonstrate dual-comb distance measurements with Allan deviations down to 12 nanometers at averaging times of 13 microseconds along with ultrafast ranging at acquisition rates of 100 megahertz, allowing for in-flight sampling of gun projectiles moving at 150 meters per second. Combining integrated soliton-comb ranging systems with chip-scale nanophotonic phased arrays could enable compact ultrafast ranging systems for emerging mass applications.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1867a225e5081530d74492e7e111b0e3eea5aec4

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Dissipative Kerr solitons in optical microresonators (2018, methodology): “measurements (LIDAR) (46), chip-scale atomic clocks, photonic Radar (135), dual-microcomb spectroscopy (38), optical coherence tomography, low-”
Optical data transmission at 44Tb/s and 10 bits/s/Hz over the C-band with standard fibre and a single micro-comb source (2020, background): “The discovery of temporal soliton states (DKS – dissipative Kerr solitons) [4,7-11] as a means of mode-locking microcombs has enabled breakthroughs in many fields including spectroscopy [12,13], microwave photonics [14], frequency synthesis [15], optical ranging [16,17], quantum sources [18,19], met”