Fast-speed and low-power-consumption optical phased array based on lithium niobate waveguides

Fast scanning-speed and low-power-consumption are becoming progressively more and more important in realizing high-performance chiplet optical phased arrays (OPAs). Here, we establish an integrated OPA based on thin-film lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform to access these outstanding performances. Significantly, a lithium niobate (LN) OPA chip is implemented by 32/48 channels LN waveguides enabled by electro-optic modulations, which showcases the low power consumption (1.11nJ pi) and fast operation speed (14.4 ns) promising the advantage of the LNOI platform for integrated OPAs. As results, we experimentally achieved a beam steering with a 62.2 degrees x8.8 degrees field of view (FOV) and a beam divergence of 2.4 degrees x1.2 degrees. Moreover, by employing sparse aperiodic arrays in waveguides design we obtained a significant reduction of lateral divergence to 0.33 degrees for the radiation beam. This work demonstrate that remarkable advantage of LNOI platform for power-saving and scalable OPA chips for various applications.