Wondering why no one has thought of using a Acousto-optic modulator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto-optic_modulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto

Wondering why no one has thought of using a Acousto-optic modulator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto-optic_modulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acousto-optic_modulator It's solid state, has a very fast response time, super cheap to manufacture, and can steer a beam with high precision. And they are very efficient, achieving a >90% first-order diffraction efficiency. The AOM material can be solid and thermally insulating (such as glass), so you can get very high power. In the paper cited, they produced a device that had an effective power of 4 mW with active cooling. How are they going to scale this up, taking into consideration first order diffraction depends on the angle of incidence of the incoming beam? The steering mechanism is basically a tunable diffraction grating which means the active area is going to be tiny. Most high power diffraction gratings work by expanding the surface area of the grating, it would still be very expensive to create a large tunable waveguide/grating (think how much it costs to make a CPU die), making the whole cost savings of solid state a moot point. You could make an array of the devices, but you're going to need a ton of them to get the necessary power and reasonable deflection angle range.