Light-Activated Ultrafast Magneto-Optical Modulator

An ultrafast light-activated magneto-optical modulator is demonstrated in this paper. This modulator is capable of 1 ns modulation speed and has a 1 mm clear aperture. The design of the modulator incorporates a photoconductive switch and enables a synchronized and jitter-free operation, which eliminates the need of any electrical or optical delay lines. These features make the current design very attractive in typical free-space pulse laser applications. To the authors' knowledge, this is so far the fastest MO modulator with such aperture size that has been reported.