Purdue and Stanford teams have developed a laser light sensing technology, which they believe will be more robust and cheaper than current systems.
“This technology is far less complex and uses less power than existing technologies,” says Amr Shaltout, a post-doctoral research fellow in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford who conceived the idea for the method. “The technology merges two different fields of nanophotonic metasurfaces and ultrafast optics.”
Conventional laser beam steering devices use phased antenna-array technology. According to the team, their innovation achieves faster speeds by orders of magnitude. The recent innovation centers on light-matter interaction between short light pulses and a silicon-based metasurface. The light-matter interactions transition from mode-locked lasers with equally spaced phased-lock frequency lines.
“That’s the basis for all of the electronic circuitry at the nanoscale to give this exciting functionality that allows the beam steering to happen,” said Brongersma, a professor in Stanford’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
Researchers also comment that their device is chip-compatible, and does not need supplementary energy sources. Shaltout continues to credit the use of photonic metasurfaces as a key component in the design.
According to Purdue University, “metasurfaces provide simple, compact and power efficient solutions to photonics design. The combination of those two technologies provide a much simpler approach.”
Laser beam steering proves useful in a number of applications. Examples include radar, imaging, tag-scanners, robotics, autonomous navigation, and space travel.
Now, researchers are aiming to scale up the design, transitioning from laboratory experiments to real-world trials with the help from investors, partners, and licensing agreements.