Optical Routing via High Efficiency Composite Acoustic Diffraction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a composite acousto-optical modulator setup that significantly enhances diffraction efficiency to over 99%, enabling high-speed, low-loss optical routing with tunable beam splitting.

Contribution

The work demonstrates a novel composite AOM configuration that achieves over 99% efficiency and fast switching, advancing acousto-optic device performance beyond traditional limits.

Findings

Achieved diffraction efficiency exceeding 99%.

Demonstrated 35 dB suppression of unwanted beams.

Enabled optical routing with switching times under 100 nanoseconds.

Abstract

Acousto-optical modulation (AOM) is a powerful and widely used technique for rapidly controlling the frequency, phase, intensity, and direction of light. Based on Bragg diffraction, AOMs typically exhibit moderate diffraction efficiency, often less than 90\% even for collimated inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that this efficiency can be significantly improved using a composite (CP) setup comprising a pair of 4-F-linked AOMs, enabling beamsplitting with fully tunable splitting amplitude and phase. The efficiency enhancement arises from two effects, termed "momentum echo" and "high-order rephasing," which can be simultaneously optimized by adjusting the relative distance between the two AOMs. This method is resource-efficient, does not require ultra-collimation, and maintains control bandwidth. Experimentally, we achieved a diffraction efficiency exceeding 99\% (excluding insertion loss) and a 35 dB single-mode suppression of the 0th-order beam, demonstrating a full-contrast optical router with a switching time of less than 100~nanoseconds. Theoretically, we formulate the dynamics of CP-AOM in terms of multi-mode quantum control and discuss extensions beyond the $N=2$ configuration presented in this work. The substantially enhanced performance of CP-AOMs, coupled with reduced acoustic amplitude requirements, may significantly advance our ability to accurately control light at high speeds with low-loss acousto-optics.