The development of a high-resolution laser radar (ladar) exhibiting sub-mm resolution would have a great impact on
standoff identification applications. It would provide biometric identification capabilities such as three-dimensional
facial recognition, interrogation of skin pore patterns and skin texture, and iris recognition. The most significant
technical challenge to developing such a ladar is to produce the appropriate optical waveform with high fideltiy. One
implementation of such a system requires a 1.5-THz linear frequency sweep in 75 &mgr;s. Previous demonstrations of
imaging with such waveforms achieved a 1 THz sweep in > 100 ms, and required additional corrections to compensate
for sweep nonlinearity. The generation of high fidelity, temporally short frequency-swept waveforms is of considerable
interest to the DoD community. We are developing a technique that utilizes a novel method to generate a 1 THz sweep
in 50 &mgr;s from a mode-locked laser. As a proof-of-principle demonstration of this technique we have successfully
generated a 20 GHz sweep in 1 µs with a fidelity sufficient to produce better than -20 dB sidelobes for a range
measurement without using any additional corrections. This method is scalable to produce the entire 1 THz sweep in 50
&mgr;s.
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