Abstract
In this paper an optical power meter using Hadamard transform, which can be used in multiple channel optical elements alignment system, is proposed. A traditional optical power meter in multiple channel optical elements alignment system is able to judge how well the elements are aligned each other by measuring optical power of the first and the last two channels with at least two detectors. It has critical drawback that the alignment accuracy per channel is dependent on the number of detectors. The proposed optical power meter can get noise reduction by the Hadamard transform based multiplexing technique. The Hadamard transform based multiplexing technique using spatial light modulators is distinguished by the best enhancement of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the reconstructed signals. Moreover, the noise reduction increases with increasing the order of multiplexing, namely the number of optical element channels. The proposed system is implemented by PDLC (Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal) mask which is operated by electric filed and generates optimal multiplexing patterns based on the Hadamard transform and single detector. It means that we obtain not only the each channel's optical power of multiple channel elements at once but also the best enhancement of SNR with single detector. Experimental results show that the proposed optical power meter is suitable for an active optical alignment system for multiple channel optical elements.
