Digital Holography Efficiency Experiments for Tactical Applications
Abstract
Digital holography (DH) uses coherent detection and offers direct access to the complex-optical field to sense and correct image aberrations in low signal-to-noise environments, which is critical for tactical applications. The performance of DH is compared to a similar, well studied deep-turbulence wavefront sensor, the self-referencing interferometer (SRI), with known efficiency losses. Wave optics simulations with deep-turbulence conditions and noise were conducted and the results show that DH out preforms the SRI by 10s of dB due to DHs strong reference. Additionally, efficiency experiments were conducted to investigate DH system losses. The experimental results show that the mixing efficiency (37%) is the dominate efficiency loss; however, excess reference noise (75%) and excess signal noise (3%-100%) are significant efficiency losses as well. Further experiments show DH effectively quantifies laser coherence as an efficiency to within + or - 3.2% of the spectral models and the observed laser coherence can be dependent on the hologram integration time. The observed laser linewidth was reduced 65% by decreasing the integration time from 100 ms to 100 mu s, thus filtering laser frequency noise and increasing the effective system range by 280%.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2019
- Accession Number
- AD1084615
Entities
People
- Douglas E. Thornton
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology