Approach to improve beam quality of inter-satellite optical communication system based on diffractive optical elements

Abstract

For inter-satellite optical communication transmitter with reflective telescope of two-mirrors on axis, a large mount of the transmitted energy will be blocked by central obscuration of the secondary mirror. In this paper, a novel scheme based on diffractive optical element (DOE) is introduced to avoid it. This scheme includes one diffractive beam shaper and another diffractive phase corrector, which can diffract the obscured part of transmitted beam into the domain unobscured by the secondary mirror. The proposed approach is firstly researched with a fixed obscuration ratio of 1/4. Numerical simulation shows that the emission efficiency of new figuration is 99.99%; the beam divergence from the novel inter-satellite optical communication transmitter is unchanged; and the peak intensity of receiver plane is increased about 31% compared with the typical configuration. Then the intensy patterns of receiver plane are analyzed with various obscuration ratio, the corresponding numerical modelling reveals that the intensity patterns with various obscuration ratio are nearly identical, but the amplify of relative peak intensity is getting down with the growth of obscuration ratio. This work can improve the beam quality of inter-satellite optical communication system without affecting any other functionality.