.
High speed, wide range, and high precise beam steering technology are fundamental to free-space optical communication (FSO). Liquid crystal optical phased array (LC-OPA) is capable of achieving non-mechanical beam steering. This paper demonstrates a parallel, four-communication access beam deflection antenna based on LC-OPA, providing a large aperture, wide steering range, and high pointing precision. This antenna is composed of a coarse tracking subsystem using cascaded liquid crystal polarized grating (LCPG) and a fine tracking subsystem based on LC-OPA. The optical aperture is 80 mm × 80 mm, arranged in 2 × 2 subapertures, each serving a single wavelength beam. Besides, a cascaded control platform based on field programmable gate array is proposed to realize low-latency response. This optical antenna achieves a steering resolution of 20 μrad and covers a range of ±12 deg in two dimensions, laying the foundation for simultaneous access of multiple terminals in FSO communication network.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.