10,000 parallel heterodyne system for instantaneous photonics-based acquisition of near-fields images over microwave devices/circuits

We have realized for the first time a heterodyne system of fairly large scale parallelism, which enables instantaneous photonic acquisition of electromagnetic near-field images over microwave devices/circuits at a specific radio frequency. It has been demonstrated that a pair of intensity and phase images of 10,000 pixels are acquired in 1 second or shorter for in-plane electric field distributions over a patch antenna or a coplanar wave-guide stub cavity. The 10,000 way parallelism of photonic heterodyne is brought about by a newly proposed scheme with a high-speed image sensor and numerical calculation.