Arbitrary femtosecond optical pulse shaping with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator

Matthew Royal; Belal Hamzeh; Mohsen Kavehrad; Sangwoo Lee

doi:10.1117/12.685638

2 October 2006 Arbitrary femtosecond optical pulse shaping with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator

Matthew Royal, Belal Hamzeh, Mohsen Kavehrad, Sangwoo Lee

Proceedings Volume 6389, Active and Passive Optical Components for Communications VI; 638913 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.685638
Event: Optics East 2006, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Abstract

Free space optical (FSO) communications technology has potential applications in the military sector to provide a secure, high speed communication channel, and in the civilian sector as a "last mile" carrier solution. It was proposed by other researchers that a multi-rate communication system that utilizes Meyer wavelets would achieve the greatest bandwidth and highest reliability possible for an FSO system. In order to generate Meyer wavelets from femtosecond laser pulses, filtering must be performed optically to produce the desired pulse shape. One of the simplest ways to produce an arbitrary pulse shape from a laser pulse is with a tunable liquid-crystal spatial light modulator (LC-SLM) in a zero-dispersion pulse compression system. The simplest approach to determine the correct mask pattern for an LC-SLM is to utilize adaptive, global optimization methods. Since it takes several milliseconds to adjust the attributes of each pixel of an LC-SLM and there are typically over one-thousand pixels, it is important to determine the fastest algorithm for determining the optimum mask pattern. Several global optimization methods, including simulated annealing, exhaustive search, and random search, a hybrid of the other two algorithms, were characterized. It was found that exhaustive search can be used to form waveforms with negligible inaccuracies at rates of about 5 times faster than simulated annealing and about 3 times faster than random search, but that simulated annealing provides the highest accuracy. However, the difference in accuracy between all of these algorithms is less than 10^-5.

Citation Download Citation

Matthew Royal, Belal Hamzeh, Mohsen Kavehrad, and Sangwoo Lee "Arbitrary femtosecond optical pulse shaping with a liquid crystal spatial light modulator", Proc. SPIE 6389, Active and Passive Optical Components for Communications VI, 638913 (2 October 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.685638

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