Low drive-power integrated acoustooptic filter on X-cut Y-propagating LiNbO/sub 3/

The authors fabricated very low power integrated acoustically tunable optical filters using walkoff-compensated miniature interdigital transducers, coupled to narrow-width acoustic waveguides. Nearly 100% transverse electric-transverse magnetic (TE-TM) polarization conversion efficiency was achieved using only 8 mW of applied RF power in a 1550-nm filter of 1.8-nm optical bandwidth. A power handling capacity of almost 100 channels was demonstrated by driving these transducers with 760 mW of RF power. These devices suffer little performance degradation in terms of filter width and sidelobe spectrum. >