Created by sebastien.popoff on 09/12/2015

Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

How to control a liquid crystal SLM with Python

Most liquid crystal Spatial Light Modulators (SLMs) and some digital micromirror devices (DMDs) are controlled via an analog (VGA) or digital (HDMI/DVI) monitor standard communication protocol. In other words, you plug it to your computer and it is recognized as a monitor display. There is usually no useful tool or API provided with the device to dynamically control the SLM. I previously introduced a way to control an SLM using Matlab/Octave, now that I switched to Python, I present here a way to do this using Python.

DOI

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Created by sebastien.popoff on 27/10/2014

Tutorials Multimode fibers

Modes of step-index multimode fibers

 

Scattering media were the first type of "complex media" for which wavefront shaping techniques were applied. Quickly, applications were developed for multimode fibers as well. One can consider multimode fiber as a complex media; because of its inherent modal dispersion (different modes travel at different speeds) and also because of the possible coupling between modes, the output field of the fiber does not resemble its input one. Wavefront shaping in multimode fibers has had a fast development because of its applications in biomedical endoscopic imaging and for telecommunications, where the exploitation of the spatial modes in multimode fibers offers a promising way to increase data rates compared to single-mode fibers. 

I present here quickly the expression of the modes of a step-index multimode fiber and the so-called linearly polarized modes, that are convenient for manipulation using shaping techniques.

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Created by sebastien.popoff on 24/10/2014

Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

How to use a binary amplitude Deformable Miror Device (DMD) as a phase modulator: The "superpixel" method

 

I previously presented a technique based on the Lee hologram that allows to use a binary amplitude modulator (like a DLP chip you find in standard projectors) to perform a phase modulation (or amplitude and phase modulation). Recently, a new technique was introduced in [S.A. Goorden et al., Opt. Express (2014)] that allows an accurate complex modulation with less loss in term of spatial resolution. This post is more a highlight on this paper than a proper tutorial. In a nutshell, while the Lee hologram only takes advantage of one dimension to encode the amplitude and phase in fringes, this technique exploits both dimensions of the pixel array using superpixels.

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Created by sebastien.popoff on 10/10/2013

Tutorials Digital holography

Off-axis holography

Off-axis holography is a popular technique to reconstruct a hologram. It allows retrieving the amplitude and the phase of a field pattern by measuring only one image with a digital camera. It relies on an intereferometric setup with a non-zero angle between the reference beam and the signal beam and requires to numerically filter the spatial frequencies. I provida Matlab and Python example codes.

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