High-Accuracy Online Calibration Scheme for Large-Scale Integrated Photonic Interferometric Measurements

Abstract

High-accuracy interferometric measurement is crucial for integrated photonic interferometric imaging. In this paper, we propose an online calibration approach for large-scale integrated photonic beam combination that can realize high-accuracy measurement. By leveraging a simple four-step switching condition and the optical path differences between interferometric beams, the instrumental characteristics of the beam combiner, including the transmittances, visibilities, and phase relations, could be calibrated accurately. Compared to the conventional approach, the calibration procedure and estimation method are greatly simplified in our proposed scheme. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated using a photonic integrated circuit with two interferometric channels. The calibration results show that the differences between the phase relations are less than 1.41% between the proposed and conventional approaches. The proposed scheme shows significant advantages in optical synthetic aperture imaging systems using photonic integrated circuits especially for applications in harsh environments.