Brillouin-Enhanced Photonic Stepped-Frequency Radar
Abstract
Photonic stepped-frequency (SF) radar offers high range resolution and only requires low-speed driving electronics, but existing architectures face challenges in achieving low phase noise and uniform frequency steps simultaneously. Here, we demonstrate a photonic SF radar system that exploits dual Brillouin lasers in a shared fiber cavity to simultaneously suppress phase noise and ensure uniform frequency stepping. Phase noise is reduced through Brillouin optomechanical suppression and common-mode noise rejection upon photomixing. Frequency-step uniformity is enforced via lasing at a series of uniformly spaced cavity resonances. The system generates an X-band SF waveform spanning 1.31 GHz, achieving >23 dB of phase-noise improvement at a 100 kHz offset relative to a low-cost driving voltage-controlled oscillator. The demonstrated system reduces the dependence of the output waveform quality on noise in the driving electronics, offering a path towards high-performance radar sensing.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.19058,
title = {Brillouin-Enhanced Photonic Stepped-Frequency Radar},
author = {Ziqian Zhang and Ryan L. Russell and Choon Kong Lai and Benjamin J. Eggleton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19058},
year = {2026}
}