SLM-based educational kit for wave optics

Abstract

Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) is a powerful active optical component to change the optical wavefront by electrical signal and had been widely investigated for many applications. We use LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) which has high reflectivity and spatial resolution as main component of SLM educational kit, and present a series of experiment to let students know the background theory of SLM. Our course mainly has three parts, the first part is the principle of LCoS SLM which has polarization, jones matrix, and uniaxial crystal theory. The second part is wave optics which can see interference, diffraction, and dispersion phenomenon. The last part is Fourier optics which has the concept of spatial frequency, spectrum, Fresnel diffraction, and Fraunhofer diffraction. This educational kit also includes software that produces some basic diffraction grating which dynamically response to parameter changing and customized user's own diffraction grating by macro commands. In this paper we will describe the background theory, experiments design, and result of experiments to show what students can learn from the SLM educational kit. © 2015 SPIE.