Wide-area acousto-optic hydrophone

Claim 1

An acousto-optic hydrophone system for sensing impinging acoustic pressure waves, said hydrophone system comprising: laser beam generating means for providing a source laser beam; beam splitting means for receiving said source beam and producing a signal beam and a reference beam therefrom; hydrophone means, having an optically transparent bulk material sensing medium filling all voids over a wide area therein, for receiving said signal beam and said reference beam from said beam splitting means and directly distributing said signal beam and said reference beam in separate, fixed equal path length wide area patterns throughout said bulk material in such a way as to modulate said signal beam in proportion to dynamic pressure variations of said impinging acoustic waves while said reference beam is not so modulated, said modulation resulting solely from changes in the index of refraction of said bulk material proportional to said dynamic pressure variations, said hydrophone means further comprising a dual chambered box, the interior of which is separable into a first chamber and a second chamber, said first chamber having one side thereof open, a rigid dividing wall mounted within said dual chambered box essentially parallel to said open side for separating the internal volume of said box into said first chamber and said second chamber, a plurality of optical reflector pairs, one each reflector of said reflector pair being rigidly mounted to opposite sides of said dividing wall at each preselected location, said plurality of pairs being arranged in such equal path length patterns as to fold said signal beam and said reference beam over a relatively wide area of each of said first and second chambers using multi-reflection off said optical reflectors, a microhole through said dividing wall, said microhole connecting said first chamber and said second chamber together, a plurality of optically transparent input windows mounted in an external wall common to said first chamber and said second chamber through which said signal beam and said reference beam may pass, a plurality of optically transparent output windows mounted in said common external wall out through which said modulated signal beam and said unmodulated reference beam may pass, optically transparent bulk material of suitable compressibility through which said signal beam and said reference beam is made to directly pass, said bulk material filling remaining voids in said first chamber, said second chamber and said microhole, a flexible membrane, covering and fixedly attached to said open side of said first chamber, for transmitting said impinging acoustic pressure waves into said bulk material within said first chamber thereby varying the index of refraction thereof while said microhole filters said impinging acoustic pressure waves out of said second chamber; beam recombining means for receiving said modulated signal beam and said unmodulated reference beam from said hydrophone means and focusing said modulated signal beam and said unmodulated reference beam in such a way as to form a single recombined modulated beam; and laser beam receiving means for receiving and converting said single recombined modulated beam into an electrical signal proportional to said impinging acoustic pressure waves.