PROGRAMMABLE ULTRASHORT OPTICAL PULSE DELAY USING AN ACOUSTOOPTIC DEFLECTOR

We present an optical pulse delay (OPD) for delaying ultrashort optica l pulses that uses an acousto-optic deflector as an active component. The OPD is designed to correct for chromatic dispersion caused by the significant color spectrum of ultrashort pulses. It is intended to be used as one of the components in a three-dimensional memory system bas ed on pulse-collision addressing in two-photon materials. Calculations show that the OPD should be able to provide 65 arbitrary delays with a random access time of similar to 1 mu s for 100-fs pulses. The power efficiency of the OPD can be as high as 85% and hence permits two uni ts to be cascaded to provide more than 4000 distinct delays. The numbe r of delays and the access time can be optimized such that a fewer num ber of delays are obtained with a shorter access time, which favors hi gh-speed operations. We provide experimental results that use a Michel son interferometer to measure three different delays, approximately 1 mm apart (equivalent to similar to 3-ps time delay), obtained with 130 -fs pulses. In addition we include an analysis of the performance of a cousto-optic devices for both monochromatic light and ultrashort pulse d lasers. Finally, we provide the design of the optical pulse-delay sy stem for a three-dimensional memory application.