Effective modeling of PA-LCoS devices and application in data storage in photopolymers

Abstract

Parallel aligned liquid crystal on silicon (PA-LCoS) devices are widely used in many optics and photonics applications to control the amplitude, phase and/or state of polarization (SOP) of light beams. We present a novel model enabling to calculate the voltage dependent retardance provided by PA-LCoS devices for a very wide range of incidence angles and any wavelength in the visible. To our knowledge it represents the most simplified approach still showing predictive capability. We are particularly interested in the application of PA-LCoS microdisplays as the data pager in holographic data storage systems (HDSS). In this work we show both theoretical and experimental results addressing hybrid-ternary modulated (HTM) data pages and using our in-house produced PVA/AA photopolymer as the storage material. We demonstrate that PA-LCoS devices cannot implement pure HTM but a rather close approximation. Experimental results with PVA/AA show bit-error rates (BER) in the range of the threshold for potential application in HDSS (about 10−3).