Combining phased array and hamming sound apodization techniques to improve the acousto-optic diffraction bandwidth

Four acousto-optic (AO) transducer designs have had their electronic operation bandwidths (BW) for the first order diffraction efficiency compared. The four designs are: (A) simple uniform sound field, (B) Hamming apodization, (C) uniform sound field with phased array (D) Hamming apodization of the sound field combined with a phased array. A Strong-AO-interaction two-order numerical analysis is applied to the four AO designs. Design (D) demonstrated superiority in the first order acousto-optic bandwidth over a three-cell phased array or Hamming apodization. Specifically the improvements in BW performance for design (D) using 1.0 dB bandwidth rule was approximately 12% over design (C) and approximately 34% over design (B).