Proposal of a Shaped Optical Antenna Realized as a Lower-Order Aspheric Surface Approximation

摘要

Optical antennas used for point-to-point communication in optical intersatellite communication must have high aperture efficiency. By means of the reflector surface shaping method, it is possible to design an antenna with high aperture efficiency and low side lobes. However, the reflector surface becomes a nonspherical surface described by a higher-order polynomial and is very susceptible to errors in the manufacturing process. This paper proposes a shaped optical antenna whose shaped surface is described without a higher-order polynomial but with a nonspherical surface of the lowest order. The error characteristics are compared with those of the conventional shaped antenna. It is demonstrated that the proposed shaped optical antenna not only is more easily fabricated but also possesses almost identical error robustness to a nonshaped antenna.