Design and Simulation of an Agile, Fast and Broad-Angle Electronically Tunable Beam Steerer Based on Cascaded Photonic Crystals

An agile, fast, and broad-angle electronically tunable beam steerer based on cascaded photonic crystal superprisms is designed. Firstly, an electronically tunable prism is used to expand the beam to have a divergence angle of a few decidegrees by its refraction index variation. The apex angle of the electronically tunable prism and the incident angle of beam are optimized to get an initial beam expansion. Then, a cascade photonic crystals (PCs) superprism system, consisted of two sets of PCs structures with an angle multiplication factor of about a hundred in total, steers the beam over 10° in angle of divergence.