A new acousto-electro-optic improved resolution deflector for high frequency operation

The two main constrains on the characteristics of the acousto-optic deflector are the acoustic sound attenuation and velocity. These two parameters will determine the resolution and the radio frequency bandwidth.Due to a double degenerated phase matching condition on a specific acousto-optic deflector configuration, the possibility of an improvement on the resolution of the acousto optic deflector becomes evident. This degenerescence is the result of the action of a D.C. electric field by the electro-optic effect. This configuration presents several advantages upon the early related works based on optical activity of selected materials and enables a wideband interaction in such a way that the number of resolvable channels is kept high. This has implications on the acousto-optic spectrometers for wideband radio astronomy research.