Abstract

It is well known that the photoelastic coupling between sound waves and refractive index variations in an acoustooptic device is electrostrictive in nature.¹ The presence of an electrostrictive nonlinearity in a medium, however, allows optical electric fields to influence the strain field within the medium. Thus an acoustooptic Bragg deflector operated at sufficiently high optical powers will exhibit a coupling from the optical fields back into the original acoustic wave. We present the theory of this optical feedback and derive the conditions in which it may be used to enhance or diminish the diffraction efficiency of an acoustooptic beam deflector.

© 1989 Optical Society of America