Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) wavefront corrector and beam steerer

Xinghua Wang; Bin Wang; John Pouch; Felix Miranda; Michael Fisch; James E. Anderson; Vassili Sergan; Philip J. Bos

doi:10.1117/12.511504

11 December 2003 Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) wavefront corrector and beam steerer

Xinghua Wang, Bin Wang, John Pouch, Felix Miranda, Michael Fisch, James E. Anderson, Vassili Sergan, Philip J. Bos

Proceedings Volume 5162, Advanced Wavefront Control: Methods, Devices, and Applications; (2003) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.511504
Event: Optical Science and Technology, SPIE's 48th Annual Meeting, 2003, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

A spatial light modulator, which is capable of high-resolution wavefront compensation and high accuracy beam steering, has been demonstrated using a Liquid Crystal On Silicon (LCOS) microdisplay with 1024×768 XGA resolution. When the device is used as a wavefront corrector, about 18.7 waves (peak-to-valley at 632.8nm) of aberration in the optical system is corrected to a residual of 1/9 wave (peak to valley) or 1/30 wave rms. Measurement of the far field beam profile confirmed the strehl ratio improved from 0.006 with the wavefront correction off, to a strehl ratio of 0.83 after correction. An additional linear phase ramp was added to the correction phase ramp to simultaneously correct and steer the laser beam. We demonstrated we can steer the beam continuously in the range of ±4 mrad in X-Y plane, with a steering accuracy better than 10μrad, or about 1/10 the diffraction limited beam divergence. The quality of the steered beam remains very high during the steering as the ellipticity of beam is smaller than 1±0.04, focused beam waist is 1.3x the diffraction limited beam waist and strehl ratio remains higher than 0.66. The 1-D beam steering efficiency is 80% at the maximum steering angle of 4 mrad, which agrees very well with our Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulation result of diffraction efficiency 86% at maximum steering angle. These results suggest that an LCOS device can be used to achieve very high-resolution wavefront control at very high efficiency.

Citation Download Citation

Xinghua Wang, Bin Wang, John Pouch, Felix Miranda, Michael Fisch, James E. Anderson, Vassili Sergan, and Philip J. Bos "Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) wavefront corrector and beam steerer", Proc. SPIE 5162, Advanced Wavefront Control: Methods, Devices, and Applications, (11 December 2003); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.511504

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available