OPTICAL BEAMSTEERING USING INTEGRATED OPTICAL MODULATORS

A device has been designed and fabricated to demonstrate the principle of using the interference pattern of a number of coherent optical sou rces to form and steer an optical beam, Steering of the beam can be ac complished by varying the relative phase of the constituent sources, T he effect of relative source phase variation and source separation var iation has been considered and optimized using a multiple source inter ference model. In this case the constituent sources are the outputs of integrated optical waveguides, excited by a common optical source to maintain relative coherence, In order to demonstrate the principle of beamsteering, a device with two constituent sources (waveguides) has b een fabricated, and the resultant output interference pattern has been laterally translated by varying the phase of the output of one wavegu ide with respect to the other, via a novel optical phase modulator.