High-Efficiency Acousto-Optic Modulation on Non-Suspended Thin-Film Lithium Tantalate
Acousto-optic (AO) interactions provide a powerful interface between the microwave and optical domains, enabling functionalities such as optical switching, non-reciprocal propagation and efficient microwave-to-optical transduction. Integrated demonstrations to date have largely relied on thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN), which offers strong piezoelectric response and low optical loss performance. Here, we establish lithium tantalate on insulator (LTOI) as a scalable platform for integrated acousto-optics. LTOI combines intrinsically low birefringence, high optical damage threshold, strong electro-optic and Kerr nonlinearities, and superior acoustic quality factors with a mature high-volume manufacturing base. We demonstrate for the first time acousto-optic modulation on the LTOI platform. By exploiting the anisotropy of surface acoustic waves, we reveal a direct correlation between acousto-optic modulation efficiency and the electromechanical coupling coefficient of lithium tantalate. In particular, acoustic excitation along the crystal Z-axis enhances the higher-order R1 mode, yielding the highest modulation efficiency. Our Mach-Zehnder interferometers achieve a modulation efficiency of 0.68 $\mathrm{\mathbf{V \cdot cm}}$, while racetrack resonators reach 0.022 $\mathrm{\mathbf{V \cdot cm}}$ -representing, to the best of our knowledge, the lowest $\mathrm{V_πL}$ demonstrated in non-suspended ferroelectric platforms. This record performance directly enables microwave-to-optical conversion without suspended structures, establishing LTOI as a robust and scalable platform for integrated acousto-optics with broad applications in communications, signal processing, and quantum information technologies.