Brillouin-Enhanced Photonic Stepped-Frequency Radar

TL;DR

This paper presents a photonic stepped-frequency radar system that uses dual Brillouin lasers to suppress phase noise and ensure uniform frequency steps, resulting in high-resolution radar signals with improved noise performance.

Contribution

The novel system exploits dual Brillouin lasers in a shared fiber cavity to simultaneously suppress phase noise and enforce frequency uniformity in photonic SF radar.

Findings

Achieved >23 dB phase-noise improvement at 100 kHz offset.

Generated an X-band SF waveform spanning 1.31 GHz.

Reduced dependence on low-noise electronics for waveform quality.

Abstract

Photonic stepped-frequency (SF) radar offers high range resolution and only requires low-speed driving electronics, but existing architectures face challenges in achieving low phase noise and uniform frequency steps simultaneously. Here, we demonstrate a photonic SF radar system that exploits dual Brillouin lasers in a shared fiber cavity to simultaneously suppress phase noise and ensure uniform frequency stepping. Phase noise is reduced through Brillouin optomechanical suppression and common-mode noise rejection upon photomixing. Frequency-step uniformity is enforced via lasing at a series of uniformly spaced cavity resonances. The system generates an X-band SF waveform spanning 1.31 GHz, achieving >23 dB of phase-noise improvement at a 100 kHz offset relative to a low-cost driving voltage-controlled oscillator. The demonstrated system reduces the dependence of the output waveform quality on noise in the driving electronics, offering a path towards high-performance radar sensing.