Universal dimension reduced phase compensation algorithm for an optical phased array

Abstract

Optical phased arrays (OPAs) can achieve non-mechanical beam deflection. Many types of OPA face the problem of low deflection efficiency due to the phase distortion induced by mutual coupling between nearby channels. In this Letter, a universal optimization algorithm is proposed to compensate for this structural phase distortion, in which the adjacent sampling principal component analysis (AS-PCA) method is introduced to reduce the dimension of the solution space. Simulations and experimental results on different classes of OPA verified that this method can considerably optimize the deflection beam with a rapid convergence speed, irrespective of the scale of OPA, and maintain the universal feature, laying the foundation for large-scale, high-density OPA in-line optimization. We envision it to become a general method on different platforms.