Three-surface model for the ray tracing of an imaging acousto-optic tunable filter.

A three-surface model is proposed for the ray tracing of an imaging acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) in the optical design of an AOTF imaging system. The first and last surfaces are two refractive planes corresponding to the incident and exit facets of the AOTF, while the property of the second surface is defined particularly to describe the change of the ray trace owing to the interaction of the acoustic and optic waves. One parameter, the acoustic angle, is first corrected using the test tuning relation to compensate for the nonideality of the acoustic wave. The model has been verified with a two-piezotransducer AOTF to show its usefulness. The differences between the measured diffracted angles and the modeling value are below 0.01°. The comparison demonstrates the accuracy and the efficiency of the three-surface model.