Harvesting Planck radiation for free-space optical communications in the LWIR band
ORAL
Abstract
We demonstrate a free-space optical communication link with an optical transmitter that harvests naturally occurring Planck radiation from a warm body and modulates the emitted intensity. The transmitter exploits an electro-thermo-optic effect in a multilayer graphene device that electrically controls the surface emissivity of the device resulting in control of the intensity of the emitted Planck radiation. We design and demonstrate multiple amplitude-modulated optical communication schemes and provide a link budget for communications data rate and range based on our experimental electro-optic characterization of the transmitter. We present an experimental demonstration achieving error-free communications at one hundred bits per second over laboratory scales and discuss how to scale this to >25km links. Finally, we discuss how to apply this system to achieve steganographic communications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06942
*This research was supported by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) award no. N00014-22- 1-2697 (H.W.), U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences award DE-FG02-0746376 (Z.C.), and National Science Foundation (NSF) award no. CBET-2012845 (H.W.). This work was also supported by a USC ISI exploratory research award.
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Publication: Submitted to optics letters: Arxiv https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.06942.pdf
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Presenters
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Haley A Weinstein
- University of Southern California