Reduction of spatio-temporal phase fluctuation in a spatial light modulator using linear phase superimposition

Abstract

Spatio-temporal phase modulation with a phase-only liquid-crystal spatial light modulator (SLM) plays an important role in the optics and photonics community. SLMs are generally affected by either or both spatial and temporal phase fluctuations, depending on driver electronics, thereby reducing the quality of a generated beam. In this study, to reduce phase fluctuations, we present an optical-based linear phase superimposition method with spatial bandpass filtering. We experimentally investigate the method’s effectiveness, particularly for holographic data storage applications. Experimental results show that the presented method is useful in robustly generating phase distributions against fluctuations, regardless of the SLM driving scheme.