提出一种新颖的温度不敏感电光振幅调制器和保偏可变光衰减器的设计方案。整个装置由一对电光晶体、一个起偏器和一对准直系统组成。采用线性电光效应的耦合波理论对调制器进行详细研究,发现一束线偏振光经过调制器后,其光场振幅直接受到调制,而相位变化如同经历一个各向同性介质,相位和偏振态都没有改变。这种调制器的优点是不存在自然双折射引起的相位延迟,没有“零场泄漏”,温度稳定性好,插入损耗小等。同时可以用作保偏可调光衰减器和电光探测器。

A new design for temperature insensitive electro-optic modulator and variable optical attenuator is presented in this paper. The modulator consists of a pair of electro-optic crystals, one polarizer and a pair of collimators. The propagation of light through the modulator is studied in detail using wave coupling theory of linear electro-optic effect. The study result demonstrates that only the amplitude of output light is modulated, and the polarization state does not change at all. Phase shift brought by natural binary refraction does not exist in the modulator, there is no zero-field leakage, temperature stability is very good, and insertion loss is small. And it can be used as variable optical attenuator and electro-optic detector, too.