A Solid-State, Electronically Tunable, Narrow Bandpass IR Filter Based on Electro-Acousto-Optic Fabry-Perot (EAOFP)

Brimrose will research and build in this SBIR Phase I program, a monolithic integrated electronically tunable IR filter for middle atmosphere temperature profiling and high resolution spectroscopy. The filter is based upon the combined acousto-optic and electro-optic multiple interference effects. Inside the device, a tunable electro-optic Fabry-Perot provides very narrow optical bandpass and an acousto-optic tunable filter suppresses the unwanted periodic Fabry-Perot bandpass and enable the broad band tuning. We should call this device electro-acousto-optic Fabry-Perot (EAOFP). The filter can be continually tuned between 1-5 um with very high spectral resolution 0.01 cm-1 (0.176 a @ 4.2 um). Some of the salient features include solid state device, fast tuning speed 10 us, high optical throughout, high extinction ratio 1000;1, high spatial resolution (>200 lines/mm) for spectral imaging applications, large field of view angle (up to 40 deg) compact and rugged. Also, this filter can be programmed to simultaneously pass arbitrarily selected multiple wavelengths for implementing powerful matched filtering algorithms.