Investigation and Verification of Acousto-Optic Modulator Performance

This paper investigates the work of an acousto-optic modulator (AOM). The first part of the experiment seeks to provide practice in aligning of the AOM modulator and measure the diffraction efficiency into the first order which is found to be (85%) in total agreement with the manual operation. The relative phases of the m=0, m=+1, m= -1 diffraction order is measured to have π phase shift relative to un diffracted beam. The transfer function of the AOM from experiment data is found to have a curve which follows a sine squared curve that obtained by theoretical measurement. The basic properties of the modulator are also measured which include, Bragg diffraction angle, speed of sound, modulation depth ,frequency response and the results are compared to the theoretical results.