Teaching optics with a spatial light modulator

Abstract

The appearance of commercial spatial light modulators (SLM) opens new ways for teaching some optical phenomena. There are possible applications in a great variety of fields: interferometry, diffraction theory, simulation and compensation of random media, Fourier Optics, etc. In this paper, we propose the use of low cost liquid crystals displays (LCDs) as SLMs to perform some interesting optical experiments. The liquid crystal SLMs are extracted from a commercial video projector. This is one of the cheapest ways to obtain a SLM. For phase modulation, it requires the calibration of the system, because the manufacturers do not provide the physical specifications of the LCDs. This work is quite instructive since many different aspects are involved in the calibration process. Finally, we show an experiment using this setup, which demonstrates that the proposed SLM is an easy-to-use and flexible tool to show some well-known optical phenomena.