VESCENT TECHNOLOGIES INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: N111-039
VESCENT TECHNOLOGIES INC. — SBIR Phase II award from Department of Defense.
- Amount
- $750,000
- Agency
- Department of Defense · Navy
- Program / Phase
- SBIR · Phase II
- Topic
- N111-039
- Solicitation
- 2011.1
- NAICS
- —
- Place of performance
- CO
- Period
- 2015-02-03 → 2017-02-01
Description
The purpose of this phase II is to design, build, and deliver wide-angle, high speed, non-mechanical laser beamsteerers that operate in the Mid Wave InfraRed (MWIR: 3.7 < < 4.9 m). These will be enabled through a combination of three innovations: i) Steerable Electro-Evanescent Optical Refractors (SEEORs) for high speed, continuous, wide-angle, beamsteering, ii) Polarization Gratings (PGs) to increase the SEEOR field-of-view (FOV), and iii) new, MWIR transparent liquid crystals (LCs) developed. The performance of these MWIR electro-optic (EO) laser beamsteerers will be unprecedented: i) FOV of >20o5o per SEEOR chip, up to 40o40o with 4 PGs and arbitrarily large, e.g., hemisphere, with multiplexing, ii) continuous, not step-wise, steering without blind spots, iii) refractive (not-diffractive) operation will enable simultaneous multi-wavelength operation, iv) random access point-to-point steer/sweep times of 10s to 100s of secs, v) output beam M2 <1.2 with sub-milliradian beam divergence, vi) comparable in size to a bic lighter, vii) only milliWatts of power consumption, and viii) simple construction that can be low cost in volume.