<title>Wide-angular-aperture acousto-optic devices</title>

Abstract

A new class of acousto-optic device that simultaneously achieves a wide angular aperture, broad bandwidth, and high diffraction efficiency is presented. Parallel tangents and beam steering are used simultaneously, which enhances the product of acceptance angle, bandwidth, and diffraction efficiency to be larger than that of isotropic acousto-optic devices by more than one order of magnitude and to be larger than that of tangentially matched acousto-optic devices by more than four times. A wide-angular-aperture acousto-optic device with a center frequency of 150 MHz and operating at 514.5 nm was optimally designed, fabricated, and its performance measured. The consistency between experiment and theory is excellent. This device can also be used as a high speed and high efficiency modulator without any change in design. This was verified experimentally and risetime of 11.7 ns was obtained. Thus, this device can be optimally used as both a wide-angular-aperture Bragg cell/deflector and a high speed modulator.