A new method for fast optical distance measurement. Free Technical Library News

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A new method for fast optical distance measurement

06.03.2018

The microresonator-based optical frequency comb enables extremely accurate distance measurements at a record speed of 100 million measurements per second. As a demonstration of how the new method works, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Swiss Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) demonstrated the process of scanning the surface of a bullet flying at a speed of 160 meters per second, when In this case, the scanning accuracy was no worse than one micrometer at any given time. The new technology relies on a solitron optical frequency comb based on a microresonator fabricated on the surface of a silicon nitride chip. And further development of this technology will make it possible to create high-precision high-speed three-dimensional cameras and compact laser scanners of the LIDAR type.

One of the components of the new system are new light sources-on-a-chip, developed and created at EPFL University. The light from these sources serves to create an optical comb, when it enters the cavity of tiny circular resonators with non-linear optical characteristics, the continuous stream of light is converted into pulses called scattered Kerr solitrons, pulses that occupy a very wide band of the optical spectrum.

Note that this research group has been working with solitron optical frequency combs for quite a long time. Last year, scientists demonstrated the possibility of using such combs in broadband optical communications. An optical comb, in fact, consists of light that has several strictly defined wavelengths, i.e. the spectrum of this light resembles the teeth of a comb. If such light travels a certain distance, then the comb parameters will change, and comparing these parameters with the parameters of the reference comb will allow you to calculate the distance traveled by the light with high accuracy. And the more broadband an optical frequency comb is, the greater the distance measurement accuracy it can provide.

In a new method for measuring distance, the researchers used two optical chips that generate two identical frequency combs. The light from one chip was used to measure the distance, and the comb generated by the second chip served as a reference signal.

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