Reduction of cross talk in an acousto-optic switch by means of dilation

Abstract
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 × 2 matrix of subswitches. Reduction of bar- and cross-state extinctions and sidelobe levels confirmed the supposition that leakage of order in a one-stage device decreases to order 2 in dilated devices.