Abstract

Both the autodyne coherent lidars and conventional coherent lidars using the cw CO₂-lasers have a restricted operational range while the use of the pulsed laser increases the range significantly. We try to combine high sensitivity inherent in the autodyne lidar techniques with the capabilities of the pulsed lidar. To this end the hybrid version of cw-pulsed autodyne lidar is suggested. Here both the cw-laser and the pulsed one are placed in the same resonator. The pulsed CO₂-laser generates the sounding signals while the cw-laser is used here as a a high sensitive detector. Such an approach makes it possible to determine the time delay between a pulse and its echo, the Doppler frequency shift and to increase the cw autodyne lidar operational range. The description of the experimental setup and the experimental results will be reported as well.

© 1991 Optical Society of America