REDUCTION OF CROSS-TALK IN AN ACOUSTOOPTIC SWITCH BY MEANS OF DILATION

It is demonstrated that cascaded (dilated) acousto-optic switches exhibit greatly reduced interport and interchannel cross talk. In our experiments, a pair of monolithic polarization-independent acousto-optic switches were joined to simulate the bar and cross states of a dilated switch consisting of a 2 x 2 matrix of subswitches. Reduction of bar- and cross-state extinctions and sidelobe levels confirmed the supposition that leakage of order epsilon in a one-stage device decreases to order epsilon(2) in dilated devices.