Abstract

Beam-steering has been a key function for various sensing and imaging applications. Mechanical beam steering devices such as polygonal mirror scanners have been widely used because of their wide deflection angle operations with high-resolutions. However, they are bulky and their beam-steering speed is limited because of their moving parts. Various approaches for non-mechanical beam steering have been reported [1, 2], which include an optical phased array, a liquid crystal phase modulator, an electro-optic crystal deflector, an in-plane laser array, a photonic crystal laser, a phase-locked VCSEL and so on. In this paper, we present the operating principle and the beam steering characteristics of super-high resolution beam steering devices composed of a Bragg reflector waveguide [3, 4]. We also show functionalities of the creation of vortex beams and the amplitude modulation based on Bragg reflector waveguides.

© 2014 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optical Society of America