Award Data

Nutronics, Inc. and Montana State University propose to develop and evaluate computational methods for a Volume Digital Holographic Wavefront Sensor (VDHWFS).VDHWFS based imaging offers the potential to provide the equivalent of wide field of view adaptive optics (AO) compensated imaging, but without the added complexity of AO components and hardware.Recent result for coherent imaging developed by ...

The Department of Defense relies on a worldwide network of radar and optical sites to maintain Space Situational Awareness.Although careful consideration during site selection process solves some of this mission's challenges, optical sensor imaging of objects at significant ranges is always hampered by many other factors, such as limited-aperture optics and atmospheric turbulence.There remains, ho ...

Nutronics, Inc. and Montana State University propose to develop an approach for non-linear control of hysteresis and incorporate (if necessary) integrated Multi-Input-Multi-Output real time control with this capability.Our control systems already include a proven high speed real time control approach to determine the optimal set of actuator commands that satisfy inter-actuator stroke limitations.O ...

Adaptive optics (AO) system performance is hindered by the mechanical limits of the deformable mirror (DM), namely stroke limits, interactuator stroke limits, and mechanical resonance.The nature of the multi-in multi-out (MIMO) control system does not lend itself well to notch filters to combat the mechanical resonances, and the stroke limits introduce non-linearities to the system.The traditional ...

The Air Force needs tunable laser systems with high average power in the mid-infrared region of the spectrum for military applications including defense against heat-seeking missiles.Currently-fieldedlaser systems, based on nonlinear frequency conversion in periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN), have limited optical power at wavelengths between 4 m and 5 m because of intrinsic absorption in th ...

Face recognition performance using deep learning has seen dramatic improvements in recent years. This improvement has been fueled in part by the curation of large labeled training datasets with millions of images of hundreds of thousands of subjects.This results in effective generalization for matching over pose, illumination, expression and age variation, however these datasets have traditionally ...

Radio frequency communications and sensors are everywhere in both personal and military life. RF fields are also used in some medical therapies. However, little is known about the medical effects that result from the routine exposure of tissue to RF fields. To understand such effects, new instrumentation is needed that can quantify the RF radiation amplitude with spatial resolution comparable to t ...

This proposed project combines advanced thin film materials engineering technology with state of the art photonic integrated circuit device concepts to develop next generation integrated electro-optic modulator devices. The proposed high speed thin film electro-optic modulator technology fills a critical need for compact, low voltage, and high analog bandwidth linear electro-optic modulators in si ...

Metasurfaces are a fascinating new direction for producing small form factor optical elements that can be directly integrated with a variety of sensors and illumination sources. Metasurfaces have received extensive attention for their potential applications in imaging optics as they enable significantly more compact camera modules with enhanced functionality and because the unit processes to creat ...

Modern Directed Energy (DE) missions require target engagements at low elevation angles and long ranges.These engagement geometries require propagation through distributed-volume turbulence. To correct for distributed-volume turbulence effects, an estimation of the turbulence along the propagation path is required. Correcting for these image aberrations will improve the quality of the target image ...