Photonic Lantern-Based LiDAR systems for future climate-neutral and smart-cities

Presently, EU citizens who live in urban areas (approx. 70% of the EU population) are exposed to airborne pollutants at levels that are damaging to health. To tackle this, the EU Commission has set an ambitious goal to transform 100 European cities into climate- neutral and smart cities by 2030, with the rest to follow by 2050. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) systems have the potential to be used in heavily urbanized areas to monitor traffic congestion and provide measurements of atmospheric contaminants. Nevertheless, current LiDAR systems suffer from poor free-space-to-fiber collection due to the use of single-mode fibers and lack the necessary collection efficiency, working range, and performance to be deployed at large scales in the smart and neutral city network. Here, we propose the development of novel photonic lantern-based LiDAR systems for CO2 and atmospheric mapping. Photonic lanterns are novel optical fiber devices that efficiently couple a multimode beam to single-mode fibers to take advantage of the performance of single-mode components. Using photonic lanterns, we can significantly increase the collection efficiency of the LiDAR system (at least 19x) and ease the complexity and size of the collection telescope. This can result in the development of portable high-performance LiDAR systems that can be used in heavily urbanized cities to generate high-resolution 3D maps of CO2 emissions and correlate them with traffic congestion. The proposed research will have significant ramifications on the life quality of millions of people while becoming a crucial pillar in the successful deployment of future climate-neutral and smart cities.