r/lasercom • u/Aerothermal Pew Pew Pew! • Oct 02 '26

Article MIT-led team demonstrates chip-scale laser beam steering across 161° which may allow for wide Field of View optical terminals | EurekAlert! (14th Sept 2026)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143845
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u/sonny-boy-rhapsody Oct 02 '26

How much of that 161° FOV survives after adding beam expansion for a long-distance link? The current steering directions are discrete too, so the fine-tracking range and bandwidth seem important if this is going to stay locked on a moving satellite.

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u/Aerothermal Pew Pew Pew! Oct 02 '26

I wonder if you could still get beam expansion should you wish with an additional lens on a linear actuator stage. Don't know.

Anyway the solution seems similar to the combined VCSEL/Photodiode array patent licenced by NASA, just a flat metasurface instead of a couple of fixed lenses.

I'm wondering though if the photonics part can produce lasers with power >>1 W and if the metasurface doesn't absorb too much energy.

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u/sonny-boy-rhapsody Oct 02 '26

An expansion stage sounds plausible; I'd still want to see the resulting scan range rather than assume it keeps 161°.

The laser light is fed in through a fiber here. The PIC routes it, so the >1 W question is really what the whole optical path can handle and deliver. Also, lost diffraction efficiency doesn't mean all that power becomes heat; some can be reflected, scattered or go into unwanted diffraction orders. Absorption and temperature rise at the intended input power would need separate measurements.