Chaotic microcomb inertia-free parallel ranging

Abstract

The increasing demand for high pixel acquisition rates in the fields of augmented reality, autonomous driving, and robotics has led to a growing interest in solid-state beam scanning solutions that do not rely on moving parts. As a result, modern photonics has been driving the development of passive beam steering technology to meet these demands. Recently demonstrated imagers based on focal plane arrays, nanophotonic metasurfaces, and optical phased arrays have enabled unprecedented pixel resolutions and measurement speeds. However, the parallelization of >100 lasers and detectors, which has been successfully implemented in commercial time-of-flight sensors, has not been widely adopted for passive scanning approaches. In this work, we demonstrate both inertia-free and parallel light detection and ranging (LiDAR) with microresonator frequency combs. We use 40 independent channels of a continuously scanned microresonator frequency comb operated in the chaotic regime in combination with optical dispersive elements to perform random modulation LiDAR with 2D passive beam steering.