Static and dynamic effects of flicker in phase multilevel elements on LCoS devices

Abstract

Phase-only modulation is necessary in a great number of modern spatial light modulation applications, and the spatial light modulator (SLM) technology of choice is usually the parallel-aligned liquid crystal on silicon (PA-LCoS) microdisplay. Various degradation effects have been analyzed in the literature which may be introduced by SLMs and whose quantitative knowledge enables to select the best working conditions and/or to design specific compensation strategies to diminish negative effects. In this paper we concentrate on the phase flicker typically produced by PA-LCoS devices. The availability of a recent polarimetric-based method, the average Stokes polarimetric technique, to measure the linear retardance and its flicker amplitude eases the capability to simulate the performance of spatially varying phase multilevel elements typically addressed onto PA-LCoS devices. A representative element is the blazed grating. Recently we demonstrated the capability of the calibration provided by the average Stokes polarimetric technique to predict the performance of blazed gratings, both their average diffraction efficiency, static analysis, and its associated time fluctuation, dynamic analysis. In the present work we take advantage of the demonstrated predictive capability of our approach to analyse to find the wide range of applicability of PA-LCoS devices in applications in spite of flicker.