Songbin Gong
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Microwave radiometry has been an essential instrument in characterizing atmospheric absorption and thermal emission for a wide range of Earth and Planetary applications. A state of the art microwave radiometry system typically covers only a few bands in a limited frequency range. Thus, it remains challenging to observe the radiometric characteristics with a single integrated solution over 2~200 GHz where both gaseous absorption and thermal emission feature multiple peaks. The proposed research seeks to develop photonic integrated circuits (PIC) for widely tunable and highly sensitive microwave and millimeter-wave radiometry. Capabilities surpassing state of the art will be demonstrated by exploiting the pronounced photonic, electro-optic and piezoelectric properties of the ion-sliced lithium niobate thin film platform for signal modulation, tunable filtering, and detection. The outcome of this research will enable a new chip-scale solution for passive microwave radiometry over a wide frequency range of 200 GHz and with fine spectral selectivity.