Sponsor: San Diego Section Chapter, COM19
Speaker: Dr. Christopher Hoy, Vice President of Business Development & Technology Integration at Boulder Nonlinear Systems, Inc.

Meeting Date: March 23, 2021
Time: 6PM
Cost:
Reservations: IEEE

Summary:
Dynamic optical beam steering is critical to many optical technologies, such as laser radar (lidar), laser illuminating beacons and designators, and free-space optical communications. To date, commercial beam steering technologies have been dominated by mechanical systems, such as gimbals, mirror galvanometers, and rotating prisms. However, the past thirty years have seen significant development in non-mechanical alternatives as a way to reduce size, weight, and power demands while improving robustness. Among non-mechanical beam steering approaches, polymer polarization gratings (PGs) offer unique advantages. In this talk, we will review the design and construction of non-mechanical steering devices using PGs, the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approach, and highlight several demonstrations of the technology in different applications. Specifically, we present demonstrations of PG beam steering in three compelling use cases: a time-of-flight camera, a coherent Doppler lidar, and a midwave infrared (MWIR) broadband passive imager.

Bio: Dr. Christopher Hoy is Vice President of Business Development & Technology Integration at Boulder Nonlinear Systems, Inc., where his roles include application development and product management for the PG beam steering technology. In addition, Dr. Hoy supports development of BNS’ liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) spatial light modulator (SLM) technology for holographic techniques in neuroscience research. Dr. Hoy received his BSME from Virginia Tech in 2004 and his MSME and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 and 2011, respectively. Since joining BNS in 2014, Dr. Hoy has served as PI on 3 SBIR Phase II’s and 3 SBIR Phase I’s, and served as Lead Scientist on a NASA program for low-SWaP coherent Doppler lidar for UAV-based wind sensing. Prior to BNS, Dr. Hoy was a post-doctoral researcher at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he developed clinical spectroscopy tools. Dr. Hoy has over 16 years of optical design experience that include the development of novel imaging systems and field-tested and deployed sensor systems. Dr. Hoy authored over 13 peer-reviewed papers, two patents, and numerous conference presentations.