Thermal light with enhanced oscillating bunching in field-tested photon-counting LIDAR.

ABSTRACT: Traditional Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) systems rely on a modulated light source to encode information in the probe signal to measure distances. Alternatively, thermal LIDAR uses non-modulated thermal sources of bunched light. In this work, we demonstrate a bunched photon source at telecom wavelength, incorporated in a photon-counting LIDAR system, which determines distances by measuring the second-order correlation. The source is a sub-threshold laser spectrally filtered to extend coherence time, producing an oscillating g⁽²⁾ curve with an enhanced bunching peak. Utilizing this oscillating bunching increases the signal-to-noise ratio and decreases the number of correlation events required to perform a measurement. This system achieves 2 ps resolution in both fiber-based

SUBMITTER: Staffas T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12775144 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature