English

3D-printed facet-attached optical elements for beam shaping in optical phased arrays

Optics 2023-01-10 v2 Applied Physics

Abstract

We demonstrate an optical phased-array (OPA) equipped with a 3D-printed facet-attached element for shaping and deflection of the emitted beam. The beam shaper combines freeform refractive surfaces with total-internal-reflection (TIR) mirrors and is in-situ printed to edge-emitting waveguide facets using high-resolution multi-photon lithography, thereby ensuring precise alignment with respect to on-chip waveguide structures. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we achieve a grating-lobe free steering range of ±30deg\pm 30{\deg} and a full-width-halfmaximum (FWHM) beam divergence of approximately 2deg2{\deg}. The concept opens an attractive alternative to currently used grating structures and is applicable to a wide range of integration platforms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2203.12989,
  title  = {3D-printed facet-attached optical elements for beam shaping in optical phased arrays},
  author = {Stefan Singer and Yilin Xu and Sebastian Tobias Skacel and Yiyang Bao and Heiner Zwickel and Pascal Maier and Lukas Freter and Philipp-Immanuel Dietrich and Mathias Kaschel and Christoph Menzel and Sebastian Randel and Wolfgang Freude and Christian Koos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.12989},
  year   = {2023}
}