All-fiber wavefront shaping by transmission matrix engineering

[S. Resisi et al., APL Photonics, 5 (2020)]

In the past 10 years, many applications were successfully demonstrated for wavefront shaping in multimode fibers, from endoscopic to telecommunications through optical tweezers. However, these techniques require to modulate the incident field using free space modulators. In the present paper, S. Resisi and co-authors introduce a new approach that relies on modulating the transmission matrix itself by applying changes that modify its boundary conditions. Using an all-fiber apparatus, focusing light at the distal end of the fiber and conversion between fiber modes is demonstrated. Since in this approach the number of degrees of control can be larger than the number of fiber modes, it allows simultaneous control over multiple inputs and multiple wavelengths.

How to generate macropixel patterns for SLMs/DMDs with the Layout module

In many wavefront shaping experiments, such as for optimization experiments, like the seminal work by I. Vellkoop and A. Mosk, or for measuring the transmission matrix, one needs to control the amplitude and/or the phase of the field on a given number of macropixels (i.e. groups of pixels). Using DMDs, amplitude, and phase modulation can be achieved using the Lee hologram method and then sending the binary images to the device using the for ALP4lib in Python for Vialux DMDs. I released here a module written by M. W. Matthès and myself to easily and efficiently generate such patterns. The code can be found on my Github account here as well as an amplitude and phase modulation example: layout_amplitude_phase_modulation.ipynb.

Setting up a DMD/SLM: Aberration effects

Digital Micromirror Devices (DMDs) are amplitude only (binary) modulators, however, pretty much like liquid crystal modulators, they introduce some phase distortion. Practically, it means that if one illuminates the modulator with a plane wave, even when all the pixels are set to the same value, the wavefront shows phase distortions after reflection. That can be detrimental, especially when working in a plane conjugated with the Fourier plane of the DMD surface. Fortunately, using the Lee hologram method or the superpixel method, one can achieve phase modulation. I present here how to use Lee holograms to characterize and compensate for aberrations when using a DMD. This approach can also be applied for compensating for aberration effects in other types of Spatial Light Modulators, such as liquid crystal ones.

Wavefront Shaping in Complex Media for Linear Analog Computation

Sebastien M. Popoff

PR'19: Photorefractive Photonics and beyond (Gerardmer, France), June 21 2019

Abstract: Performing linear operations using optical devices is a crucial building block in many fields ranging from telecommunications to optical analog computation and machine learning. For many of these applications, key requirements are robustness to fabrication inaccuracies, reconfigurability, and scalability. Traditionally, the conformation or the structure of the medium is optimized in order to perform a given desired operation. Since the advent of wavefront shaping, we know that the complexity of a given operation can be shifted toward the engineering of the wavefront, allowing, for example, to use any random medium as a lens. We propose to use this approach to use complex optical media such as multimode fibers or scattering media as a computational platform driven by wavefront shaping to perform analog linear operations. Given a large random transmission matrix representing the light propagation in such a medium, we can extract any desired smaller linear operator by finding suitable input and output projectors. We demonstrate this concept by finding input wavefronts using a Spatial Light Modulator that causes the complex medium to act as a desired complex-valued linear operator on the optical field.