Abstract

In the conventional approach to strong acoustooptic interaction, the usual model is that of a rectangular sound column illuminated by a plane wave of light. By considering either the coupled modes of the unperturbed medium or the eigenmodes of the perturbed medium, a solution can then be found which predicts discrete plane waves of light as the diffracted orders. This model gives results in reasonable agreement with theory for configurations that approximate it. However, the physical reality of strongly interacting, arbitrary, diffracting sound and light fields is obviously very different from the simple, plane wave-sound column model. Qualitatively, any discrete orders predicted by the latter model can be explained in terms of multiple scattering in the physics based approach.¹ Quantitatively, the solution must be framed in terms of Feynman diagrams and path integrals.² A quantum mechanical interpretation of this formalism is one of photon transitions induced by the sound field. We report here on recent successful numerical experiments that simulate this quantum mechanical model by Monte Carlo methods using a classical computer.

© 1989 Optical Society of America