Abstract

Overall system performance in pulsed Lidars strongly depends on the spatial quality of the emitted beam and the attained pulse energy level. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a good beam quality with increasing output powers or pulse energies required by future operational systems. Transmitter configurations employing wavefront corrections are thus needed. Virtually all commercially available phase conjugate mirror (PCM) are realized in a liquid or gaseous cell using stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS). Their chemical aggressiveness with the associated difficulty in handling makes these cells rather unsuitable for space use. Among solid-stale materials, fused silica has already shown a good potential at 10 Hz [1]. In this communication, we present a solid-state PCM based on SBS in a fused silica rod suitable for space environment with reliable operation at higher repetition rates.

© 2007 IEEE