McMaster University

Purpose

All-weather optical satellite communication (satellite-to-ground and ground-to-satellite) still remain a challenge due to the laser wavelengths used in the current optical satellite communication systems, mainly located in visible and near-infrared (NIR) wavelength ranges, which cannot penetrate through fog, rain and snow. Optical satellite communication at mid-infrared (MIR) wavelengths is desired since the light scattering is much less for wavelengths in MIR than for NIR wavelengths. However, due to the lack of mid-IR photonic devices (i.e. lasers, modulators and detectors), most of the optical satellite communication experiments to date are demonstrated at visible and NIR wavelengths. This project will develop detectors that are more sensitive to NIR light, and detectors that operate in the MIR. The new technologies that will be developed include multispectral MIR photodetectors and quasi-phase matched (QPM) optical nonlinear conversion.