Calomel-made crystalline acousto-optical cell designed for an advanced regime of noncollinear two-phonon light scattering

Abstract

We study the potentials of a wide-aperture crystalline calomel-made acousto-optical cell. Characterizing this cell is nontrivial due to the chosen regime based on an advanced noncollinear two-phonon light scattering. Recently revealed important features of this phenomenon are essentially exploited in the cell and are investigated in more detail. These features can be observed more easily and simply in tetragonal crystals, e.g., calomel, exhibiting specific acousto-optical nonlinearity caused by the acoustic waves of finite amplitude. This parametric nonlinearity manifests itself at low acoustic powers in calomel possessing linear acoustic attenuation. The formerly identified additional degree of freedom, unique to this regime, is exploited for designing the cell with an eye to doubling the resolution due to two-phonon processes. We clarify the role of varying the central acoustic frequency and acoustic attenuation using that degree of freedom. Then the efficiency of calomel is exploited to expand the cell’s bandwidth with a cost of its efficiency. Proof-of-principle experiments confirm the developed approaches and illustrate their applicability to innovative techniques of optical spectrum analysis with the improved resolution. The achieved spectral resolution of 0.205 A at 405 nm and the resolving power 19,800 are the best for acousto-optical spectrometers dedicated to space or airborne operations to date as far as we know.