Optimal illumination of phase-only diffractive element using GPC light shaper

Abstract

We have previously proposed and demonstrated optimal beam shaping of contiguous light patterns using the Generalized Phase Contrast (GPC) method. The concept has been packaged into a compact add-on module, which we call the GPC light shaper (LS) that can be conveniently integrated to existing optical setups requiring optimal illumination of devices such as spatial light modulators (SLMs). In this work, we integrated the GPC LS into a holography setup to generate more intense focal spots and extended patterns. The output of the holography setup with the GPC LS is compared with a similar setup but using only hard-truncated beams. Our results show that, we get a ~3x gain in intensity of the generated patterns when using GPC LS.