Electrooptic Modulation Research. Electrooptic Modulators

摘要

The work is aimed mainly at improving the overall performance of Pockels electrooptic modulators. Current Pockels cells have very limited field of view, high driving voltages, and low speed. This severely limits Pockels cells for many practical applications. It would be very important to have a large field of view, low driving voltage, and high speed Pockels cell. A Pockels cell can be explained using polarization theory and the electrooptic effect. Based on these theories, the propagation of polarized light at various angles through Pockels cells can be traced by computer, but that method offers little insight. This work recasts the problem in a new way which is both accurate and straightforward. It develops a simplified computer model by extending a model developed at NIST (National Institutes of Standards and Technology). To improve the field of view two material-independent approaches are derived. The first this work proves (for the first time) the thinner-is-better hypothesis. Second, it derives a system configuration which both allows an arbitrary field of view and improved performance. It then shows how this analysis can be used to improve Spatial Light Modulators.