All-optical bandwidth-tailorable radar

Abstract: Radar has been widely used in military, security, and rescue. Metamaterial cloak is employed in stealth targets to evade radar detection. Hence modern radar should be reconfigurable at multi-bands for detecting stealth targets, which might be realized based on microwave photonics. Here, we demonstrate an all-optical bandwidth-tailorable radar architecture. It is a coherent system utilizing one mode-locked laser for both signal generation and reception. Heterodyning of two individually filtered optical pulses that are pre-chirped via wavelength-to-time mapping generates wideband linearly-chirped radar signal. The working bands can be flexibly tailored with desired bandwidth at user-preferred carrier frequency. After modulated onto the pre-chirped optical pulse, radar echoes are time-stretched and frequency-compressed by several times. The digitization becomes much easier without loss of detection ability. We believe that the demonstration can innovate the radar's architecture with ultra-high range resolution.