English

Diffractive Retroreflector for Distributed Sensing

Optics 2025-10-17 v1

Abstract

We introduce a modified corner cube reflector that encodes information from passive optical sensors in its retroreflected diffraction pattern, enabling remote sensor-state measurement over a single-ended optical link. The design interferes a reference path and a sensor-modulated path within the retroreflected beam to produce an interferometric signal suitable for reading out phase and amplitude variations with a squarelaw camera. This enables sensor-state determination in arbitrarily oriented passive nodes, extending coherent interferometric read out of chemical, biological, and physical sensors to scalable, robust, and inert field deployments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.14196,
  title  = {Diffractive Retroreflector for Distributed Sensing},
  author = {Anne R. Kroo and Olav Solgaard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14196},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

10 figures, 7 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T06:40:14.833Z