Patent ID: 6867920

Claim:
Apparatus for controlling the optical coupling of an input optical beam to one of a plurality of output optical facilities, comprising a plurality of lenses linearly arranged in separate groups, each group including a contiguous pair of lenses, each lens aligned to couple a received optical beam to one of the plurality of output optical facilities, a plurality of output optical facilities, each optical facility aligned co-axially with a corresponding one of the plurality of lenses, and wherein contiguous pairs of the plurality of lenses are arranged to have a predetermined space between such contiguous pairs, so that when the direction of a received beam is misaligned to a first lens of a contiguous pair, only a first portion of the received beam gets coupled to the corresponding output facility of that first lens to become an output beam and a second portion of the received beam propagates into the predetermined space so as not to be coupled to any of the plurality of output optical facilities.