Appeal No. 2005-2111 3
Application No. 09/827,454
conjugation of the power beam is said to result in a high power encoded return beam that
automatically tracks the input beam and is corrected for atmospheric distortion. Intra-
cavity non-degenerate four wave mixing is used in the broad area device to produce the
return beam.
“Broad area” indicates that the micro-phase conjugators are large aperture phase
conjugators in a semiconductor device and that the micro-conjugators are multimode
(spatially). Whereas conventional devices spatially filter an atmospherically aberrated
input beam, destroying the spatial information required to produce a spatially phase
conjugated retro-beam, making such devices unsuitable for correcting for atmospheric
distortions, it is said that the instant invention has an aperture of broad area defined from
the top of the RM-PCM 310 device shown in Figure 3B (see pages 4-5 of the principal
brief, and pages 5, 6, and 11 of the specification).
According to appellant, the two-dimensional claimed broad area intra-cavity phase
conjugator is capable of resolving a substantial portion of the spatial components of the
input waveform of the interrogating beam to enable correction for an atmospherically
aberrated beam.
Representative independent claim 1 is reproduced as follows:
1. A system comprising:
a transceiver constructed to transmit an interrogating beam;
a communications station capable of receiving said interrogating beam;
Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Next
Last modified: November 3, 2007