DYNAMIC PULSED BEAM STEERING USING VIRTUALLY IMAGED PHASED ARRAY

Optical beam steering is of significant importance for various emerging applications such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free space optical communication, and holographic display. However, the development of schemes for dynamic spatio-temporal beam steering has been limited in the past. A previous study achieved dynamic and continuous angular beam steering of isolated ultrashort pulses from a mode-locked laser by using a passive metasurface emulating a diffraction grating followed by a lens. In this thesis, we experimentally demonstrate dynamic spatio-temporal steering of high repetition rate pulse trains using a spatial array of frequency combs with a uniform gradient in their carrier-envelope offsets. To accomplish this, we leverage the capabilities of a virtually imaged phased array (VIPA), which is a side-entrance Fabry-Perot etalon, and employ successive spatial Fourier transforms facilitated by a 4f optical lens system. Our experimental results successfully demonstrate the periodic scanning of ultrashort pulse trains generated from an electro-optic comb at a repetition rate of ~10 GHz. The scanning occurs in discrete steps of ~115 μm and ~20 ps in the spatial and temporal domains, respectively.