Sadly, it didn’t come with the RF driver, but no matter - a few quick eBay purchases put the needed RF generator and power amplifier on his bench. To explore the way sound can bend light, picked up a commercial AOTF from the surplus market. Change the excitation frequency, and the filter’s frequency changes too. The alternating bands of compressed and expanded material within the crystal act like a diffraction grating. The RF signal excites the transducer, which vibrates the TeO 2 crystal and sets up a standing wave within it. An AOTF is a device that takes a radio frequency input and applies it to a piezoelectric transducer that’s bonded to a crystal of tellurium oxide. So it would seem that it might be difficult to use sound to modify light, but with the right equipment, it’s actually pretty easy.Įasy, perhaps, if you’re used to slinging lasers around and terms like “acousto-optic tunable filter” fall trippingly from your tongue, as is the case for.
Light can travel through a vacuum, while sound needs some sort of medium to transmit it. Light is electromechanical in nature, while sound is mechanical.
We all know that light and sound are wave phenomena, but of very different kinds.
