Darrel Emerson
Last revised May 27 1998
There are currently two independent local oscillator development programs.
The first (see below) is a photonic local oscillator, which involves beating
two IR lasers together to produce a mm-wave or submm-wave phase-locked
difference frequency. The second is a more conventional system, involving
frequency multipliers. If the photonic scheme is successful, it offers
considerable savings in cost, reliability and complexity
to the MMA project; however,
it is as yet an unproven system and so NRAO is currently
pursuing both approaches in parallel.