True-time-delay adaptive array processing using photorefractive crystals

Abstract

Radio frequency (RF) signal processing has proven to be a fertile application area when using photorefractive-based, optical processing techniques. This is due to a photorefractive material's capability to record gratings and diffract off these gratings with optically modulated beams that contain a wide RF bandwidth, and include applications such as the bias-free time-integrating correlator [1], adaptive signal processing, and jammer excision, [2, 3, 4]. Photorefractive processing of signals from RF antenna arrays is especially appropriate because of the massive parallelism that is readily achievable in a photorefractive crystal (in which many resolvable beams can be incident on a single crystal simultaneously - each coming from an optical modulator driven by a separate RF antenna element), and because a number of approaches for adaptive array processing using photorefractive crystals have been successfully investigated [5, 6]. In these types of applications, the adaptive weight coefficients are represented by the amplitude and phase of the holographic gratings, and many millions of such adaptive weights can be multiplexed within the volume of a photorefractive crystal. RF modulated optical signals from each array element are diffracted from the adaptively recorded photorefractive gratings (which can be multiplexed either angularly or spatially), and are then coherently combined with the appropriate amplitude weights and phase shifts to effectively steer the angular receptivity pattern of the antenna array toward the desired arriving signal. Likewise, the antenna nulls can also be rotated toward unwanted narrowband jammers for extinction, thereby optimizing the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. © 2007 Springer.