Appeal No. 2005-2111 2
Application No. 09/827,454
Temporal encoding of retro-modulator phase conjugate mirrors (RM-PCM) permits
a high signal to noise communications link to be established. Most low power nonlinear
optical phase conjugation systems for communication links are based on photorefractive
effects in crystals, but these methods often require mutual coherence between the signal
(probe) beam and the pump beams and generally employ self-pumped non-collinear
degenerate four-wave mixing configurations.
Although low power phase conjugation with self-pumped photorefractive crystals
can be useful in many applications, it suffers from the major limitation that the power
transmitted in the retroreflected beam will always be a very small fraction of the probe
beam, a large amount of probe beam power will be needed to initiate the link, and since
the response time of photorefractive systems is inversely proportional to the incident
intensity, the link will be limited to extremely low data and tracking rates. While operating
power can be relatively low in configurations that phase conjugate the retroreflected beam
at the probe transmitter, a higher power probe beam is generally required to initiate the
link.
In order to improve upon this prior art, the instant invention comprises a transceiver
constructed to transmit an interrogating beam and a communication station for receiving
and interrogating the beam, wherein the communication station has a plurality of broad
area intra-cavity phase conjugators (micro-phase conjugators) arranged in an array.
Information from the communication station is remotely extracted. The nonlinear phase
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