The performance of conventional optical adaptive beam formers for rf c
ommunication and radars is shown to require a compromise between the c
onvergence speed and interference cancellation ratio. To alleviate thi
s trade-off, a novel nonlinear algorithm with switched step size is pr
oposed. Results of direct simulation and numerical solution are presen
ted to illustrate the approach. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.