Narrow main beam, low side lobes! High performance electro-optic beam steering using thin-film lithium niobate optical phased array
Shannon, County Clare, Ireland, February 27, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Announcing a new publication from Opto-Electronic Sciences. DOI 10.29026/oes.2026.260002. Optical beam steering plays a critical role in modern photonics, enabling key technologies such as free-space optical communications, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and biological light manipulation. Compared with traditional mechanical scanning methods, optical phased array (OPA) is a key solution for all-solid-state beam scanning technology, which has advantages such as no mechanical inertia, fast response, and high integration, making it a current research hotspot. However, existing integrated OPA technologies still face challenges such as wide main beam, high sidelobes, and limited scanning resolution, which significantly limit their application in high precision and high signal-to-noise ratio scenarios. In recent years, thin film lithium niobate has provided a promising integrated photonics platform to solve these bottlenecks due to its excellent electro-optic effect and low optical loss. Nevertheless, simultaneously achieving both a narrow main beam and low sidelobes within a limited aperture remains a long-standing and difficult problem.
To address this issue, the authors of this article propose an innovative thin-film lithium niobate OPA design that enables high-performance electro-optic beam steering with a narrow main beam and suppressed sidelobes. This study provides important support for the development of chip-scale beam steering devices in applications such as free-space optical communications and LiDAR.
To address the long-standing challenge of balancing beam quality and steering performance in conventional OPAs, the authors propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel electro-optic beam steering scheme based on thin-film lithium niobate. The goal is to simultaneously achieve a narrow beamwidth and low sidelobes within a compact device footprint.
The research group leverages the strong electro-optic effect of thin-film lithium niobate to introduce multiple innovative design strategies to achieve high-performance two-dimensional electro-optic steering OPAs. By adopting a superlattice ridge waveguide structure, optical crosstalk between adjacent array elements is effectively suppressed and cleaner far-field radiation is achieved. Additionally, a non-uniformly spaced array optimized using a particle swarm optimization algorithm is implemented to significantly improve the steering resolution while maintaining effective sidelobe suppression. Moreover, the integration of a single trapezoidal end-fire radiator and an etched diffraction grating makes it possible to further compress the mainlobe beamwidth under limited aperture conditions. Experimental results show that this 16-channel optical waveguide phased array can achieve a main beam width of 0.99° × 0.63° using an optical aperture of only 140 μm × 250 μm. At the same time, we achieve a wide two-dimensional steering field of view of 47° × 9.36° and sidelobe suppression of 20 dB, demonstrating excellent electro-optic modulation and beam steering performance. This achievement not only validates the effectiveness of simultaneous optimization of narrow beam, low sidelobes, and wide steering range, but also provides a promising technological path toward high-performance, low-power, and integrable beam steering devices.
Keywords: heterogeneous lithium niobate waveguide array, superlattice waveguide, optical beam steering, narrow beam, low sidelobe
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The research group on Optical Waveguide Hybrid Integration and Micro-Nano Optical Devices is deeply engaged in integrated photonics and strives to overcome major technological bottlenecks. Their main research explores the interaction of light and matter at the micro-nanoscale, as well as applications in light production, transmission, modulation, detection, and sensing. The team has achieved significant results in the research field of waveguides and micro-nano optical devices, and has published many important results in prestigious international journals such as Nature Nanotechnology, Light: Science & Applications, Laser & Photonics Reviews, Nano Letters, Research, Applied Physics Letters, Optical Letters, Optical Express, and Photonics Research. Their research is supported by funding from the China National Key Research and Development Program, the National Science and Technology Major Project, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Guangdong Provincial Outstanding Young Scientist Fund, the Guangdong Provincial Special Support Program, and others.
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Opto-Electronic Science (OES) is a peer-reviewed, open access, interdisciplinary and international journal. OES is indexed in ESCI, Scopus, DOAJ, and CAS databases and has a 2025 Scopus CiteScore Tracker of 30.7 and a JCR Immediate Impact Factor of 26.
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Li Y, Deng SY, Ma X et al. Electro-optic beam steering of narrow beams and low sidelobes on thin-film lithium niobate optical phased arrays. Optoelectronic Science 5, 260002 (2026). DOI: 10.29026/oes.2026.260002
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