A Compact Transient Electric Field Sensor Using a Pair of Conjugate Lithium Niobate Crystal

In this paper a compact, high-sensitivity Pockels optical electric field sensor using a pair of Lithium Niobate (LiNbO<sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sub>) conjugate crystal. By using the side-by-side conjugate crystal both the sensitivity and temperature stability of the sensor are enhanced, while the sensor size remains almost the same. The dimension of the fabricated sensor is 70 × 15 × 10 mm³. The measured nanosecond EMP and the LEMP showing good consistency with the input voltage waveform. The sensitivities reach 1.37 mV/(kV·m⁻¹) for measuring the nanosecond EMP and reach 3.04 mV/(kV·m⁻¹) for measuring the LEMP. Besides, in the frequency domain, the sensor output fluctuates within ± 7 dB in the range of 100 kHz to 1 GHz. All these results real that the sensor can be used to accurately measure the time-domain waveforms of the transient EMP.