An underwater chaotic lidar sensor based on synchronized blue laser diodes

We present a novel chaotic lidar system designed for underwater impulse response measurements. The system uses two recently introduced, low-cost, commercially available 462 nm multimode InGaN laser diodes, which are synchronized by a bi-directional optical link. This synchronization results in a noise-like chaotic intensity modulation with over 1 GHz bandwidth and strong modulation depth. An advantage of this approach is its simple transmitter architecture, which uses no electrical signal generator, electro-optic modulator, or optical frequency doubler.