“Noiseless Image Amplification”

Dr. Nikolai Stelmakh

Department of Electrical Engineering

University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76019

Wednesday, March 25, 2009 6:30pm

Location: Photodigm Inc.

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Abstract

The enhancement of resolution and sensitivity of optical remote imaging sensors such as LIDARs is important in military, environmental, and medical applications, and is the goal of DARPA Quantum Sensors Program. In this talk, we will discuss our work under this program focusing on using phase-sensitive parametric amplifiers to overcome the image degradations due to finite receiver’s aperture and non-ideal detection. Phase-sensitive amplifiers are unique devices capable of noiseless amplification of optical signals. They have gained popularity recently in telecom community for amplifying single-spatial-mode signals in optical fibers. We have extended this concept to simultaneous amplification of a multitude of spatial modes, i.e. images, in nonlinear crystals. The pump beam size and the spatial bandwidth of the crystal determine the k-vector selection rules and the effective number of the amplified modes (pixels). The mode manipulation techniques developed earlier in our group for semiconductor laser mode combining have proven to be useful in optimizing the pixel count. In this talk, we will discuss the design and optimization of the parametric image amplifiers, and their expected impact on the LIDAR performance.

Biography

Dr. Stelmakh started his research career at the Ioffe Institute (St. Petersburg, Russia) in the group of Zh. I. Alferov (Nobel Prize 2000). From 1990 to 2000 he worked at the CNRS (France) focusing on pulsed injection-locking, chirped laser diode mode-locking, and high-energy pulse generation from laser diode arrays. From 2000 to 2003 he was the vice-president of Applied WDM, a Texas startup company that had developed ultra-low-loss AWG planar optical circuits. Since 2003 he has been with the University of Texas at Arlington, where he is working on interfacing the laser diodes with silica-on-silicon planar optics, nonlinear optics and nanophotonics. His recently proposed concept of direct reshaping of broad-area laser radiation by phase manipulation techniques has found an interesting application in parametric noiseless amplification of images.