I realize that this is what Pockels cells are meant for, however it appears to me as though the Pockels cells have much lower damage thresholds than many of the Faraday rotators I could find and this is where the current design could potentially fall short.
Pockels cells have a superior switching frequency as far as I can tell, however for the application I have in mind you would only need to be able to switch in the 100-200Hz range with no sharp transition necessary, as long as you get a 100ns window of accurate polarization selection.
I could so far only find fixed passive rotators that will rotate 45degrees on each pass, however I am looking for a 90degree single pass system. Phase delay etc. is not really an issue.
Thanks for any help.
I don't think I've ever encountered a switchable Faraday rotator.
What kind of pulse energies are you dealing with? I have used a Pockels Cell with a picosecond source, 80 MHz repetition rate, about about 10 ns per pulse. That's certainly a power level where optics can begin to fail, but my PC performed without any degradation for a couple of years, at least.
First, you should be using a slow focus through the cell, so the beam experiences as little divergence as possible. So the spot size should be relative large, and therefore power density low. You can also look into large-aperture cells. Cells like that are usually "slow" - but that's for fast-pulse people, they'll be plenty fast for your application.
Thanks for the answers. I forgot to mention the pulse powers. We currently use 1.6J 10ns pulses at 1064nm. Apologies
@ Boris L. Glebov: Could you point me to the Pockels cell you are using?
@ Vincent Lecoeuche : These are communication switches. I very much doubt they can do what I want them to.
Oh, I see, those are some very serious pulses :). The PCs I used were from Conoptics: http://www.conoptics.com/
Any additional difficulty you will face is that efficiency of these cells tends to drop off with wavelength, unfortunately.
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