Progress in Phase Calibration for Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulators

Abstract

Phase-only Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) is one of the most widely used devices for phase modulation. It has been successfully applied in the field with requirements of precision phase modulation such as holographic display, optical tweezers, lithography, etc. However, due to the limitations in the manufacturing process, the grayscale-phase response could be different for every single SLM device, even varying on sections of an SLM panel. A diverse array of calibration methods have been proposed and could be sorted into two categories: the interferometric phase calibration methods and the diffractive phase calibration methods. The principles of phase-only SLM are introduced. The main phase calibration methods are discussed and reviewed. The advantages of these methods are analyzed and compared. The potential methods for different applications are suggested.

Special Issue on Liquid Crystal on Silicon Devices: Modeling and Advanced Spatial Light Modulation Applications

“…A good complement to the previous paper is given by Li and Cao [8]. The authors focus their review on the available characterization techniques to obtain the grayscale-phase response of LCoS devices.…”

Pixel Super-Resolution Phase Retrieval for Lensless On-Chip Microscopy via Accelerated Wirtinger Flow

“…Readers may refer to [41] for a detailed description of the system configuration. The phase response of the SLM was calibrated by a self-referenced interferometric method [77][78][79]. The phase modulation patterns were randomly generated and then Gaussian-filtered in order to introduce enough diversity while minimizing the crosstalk effect between adjacent SLM pixels.…”

High-Precision Calibration of Phase-Only Spatial Light Modulators

“…To begin with, let us outline the working principle of a reflective phase-only SLM, which is currently the mainstream product widely used for the dynamic engineering of the wavefront. The structure of SLM is a sandwich layer filled with parallel nematic liquid crystals between a glass cover plate and a silicon backplane [22]. The cover plate is coated with a layer of transparent conducting film acting as the common electrode, while the silicon backplane has millions of individually addressable reflective electrode pixels.…”