Recent advances in all-optical acousto-optic devices

Conventional acousto-optic devices employ an RF electrical signal applied to a piezoelectric transducer to generate ultrasound. Recent work has been toward all-optical devices in which a high power laser is used to generate ultrasound within an optically clear material. This offers potential to perform acousto-optic modulation without piezoelectric transducers and RF oscillators, and to therefore develop signal processors that work directly on optical data channels. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of all-optical AO devices for both bulk wave and surface acoustic wave modulation