Electro-Optical Devices Obtained by LiNbO3 Crystals

Abstract

AbstractLithium niobate (LiNbO3) is a material of wide interest for both fundamental research and applications because of the richness of its physical properties. It is a ferroelectric, pyro-, and piezoelectric (PZ) material with large electrooptic (EO), acoustooptic and photoelastic coefficients. At the same time, it is transparent from the band gap edge absorption at about 320 nm up to the first infrared vibrational absorption at a wavelength of about 5 μm, covering all the visible and near infrared spectral regions. This provides a wide spectral window for photonic applications.In this chapter, two kinds of LiNbO3 based electro-optical devices are presented: a point diffraction interferometer and a tunable two-dimensional hexagonal phase array.The latter operates also as a Talbot array illuminator (TAIL): it can transform a plane wave into a periodic optical intensity pattern. The efficiency of all mentioned devices depends on the uniformity of crystals’ electro-optic properties and on the possible presence of defects in the built device. Therefore, they can both become key tools to be exploited in different fields of applications, such as spatially addressed multiplexing in optical telecommunications or wavefront modifiers in a large number of optical experiments.KeywordsLithium NiobateFringe PatternSpatial Light ModulatorPhase MaskLithium NiobateThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.