Long-distance ranging with high precision using a soliton microcomb

Abstract

Laser-based light detection and ranging (lidar) plays a significant role in both scientific and industrial areas. However, it is difficult for existing lidars to achieve high speed, high precision, and long distance simultaneously. Here, we demonstrate a high-performance lidar based on a chip-scaled soliton microcomb (SMC) that can realize all three specialties simultaneously. Aided by the excellent properties of ultrahigh repetition rate and the smooth envelope of the SMC, traditional optical frequency comb (OFC)-based dispersive interferometry is heavily improved and the measuring dead zone induced by the mismatch between the repetition rate of the OFC and resolution of the optical spectrum analyzer is totally eliminated. Combined with an auxiliary dual-frequency phase-modulated laser range finder, the none-dead-zone measurable range ambiguity is extended up to 1500 m. The proposed SMC lidar is experimentally implemented in both indoor and outdoor environment. In the outdoor baseline field, real-time, high-speed (up to 35 kHz) measurement of a long distance of ∼ 1179 m is achieved with a minimum Allan deviation of 5.6 μm at an average time of 0.2 ms (27 nm at an average time of 1.8 s after high-pass filtering). The present SMC lidar approaches a compact, fast, high-precision, and none-dead zone long-distance ranging system, aimed at emerging applications of frontier basic scientific research and advances in industrial manufacturing.

Directly accessing octave-spanning dissipative Kerr soliton frequency combs in an AlN microresonator

“…The recent demonstration of dissipative Kerr solitons (DKSs) [6,7], with a double balance between Kerr nonlinearity and dispersion as well as loss and parametric gain in the optical resonator, has provided a route to a fully coherent microcomb with a smooth spectral envelope and broadened width due to soliton-induced Cherenkov radiation [8,9]. The soliton microcomb has ubiquitous commercial potential for applications in dual-comb spectroscopy [10], coherent communications [11], frequency synthesizer [12], long-distance measurements [13], and quantum key distribution [14].…”

Fabrication of the high-Q Si3N4 microresonators for soliton microcombs

“…Compared with the conventional optical frequency comb generated by the mode-locked laser, the performance of the soliton microcomb has the advantages of low-power consumption, small footprint, simple structure, and integrability [2,14] . Therefore, in addition to providing an ideal platform for the study of nonlinear physics [15][16][17] , the soliton microcomb has shown a promising future in many applications, such as optical frequency synthesizer [18] , optical atomic clock [19] , light detection and ranging (LiDAR) [20][21][22][23] , low-noise microwave source [24][25][26][27] , coherent optical communication [28,29] , quantum key distribution [30] , dual-comb spectroscopy [31][32][33][34] , and optical coherence tomography [35,36] .…”

Nanometer Precision Time-Stretch Femtosecond Laser Metrology Using Phase Delay Retrieval

“…To reach higher precision, combined approach based on TOF method and coherent detection is adopted. Cross-correlation-based TOF method [6], [7], synthetic wavelength interferometry [8]- [10], spatial dispersive interferometry [11], [12], and dual comb interferometry [13]- [15] can realize nanometer precision with averaging time of several milliseconds to seconds.…”