Created by sebastien.popoff on 01/07/2024

Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

A practical guide to Digital Micro-mirror Devices (DMDs) for wavefront shaping

 

Sébastien M Popoff1 , Rodrigo Gutiérrez-Cuevas1 , Yaron Bromberg2 and Maxime W Matthés1

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Digital micromirror devices have gained popularity in wavefront shaping,  offering a high frame rate alternative to liquid crystal spatial light modulators. They are relatively inexpensive, offer high resolution, are easy to operate, and a single device can be used in a broad optical bandwidth. However, some technical drawbacks must be considered to achieve optimal performance. These issues, often undocumented by manufacturers, mostly stem from the device's original design for video projection applications. Herein, we present a guide to characterize and mitigate these effects. Our focus is on providing simple and practical solutions that can be easily incorporated into a typical wavefront shaping setup.

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DMD

Created by sebastien.popoff on 01/05/2021

Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

Controlling a Spatial Light Modulator remotely using a Raspberry Pi

Standard phase spatial light modulators (SLMs) have the advantage of being controlled as a secondary display. It saves money on dedicated control interfaces and simplifies the usage. However, when trying to control an experiment remotely, which is especially needed these days, It adds some complexity when using remote desktop software or ssh. I will detail here how to use a Raspberry Pi to control an SLM and send images from a computer on the same local network. The computer that controls the experiment can now easily be controlled from the comfort of your home.


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Created by sebastien.popoff on 29/09/2020

Highlights Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

Easy characterization of SLMs' phase deformation

[D. Marco et al., Opt. Lett., 45 (2020)]

Technical papers are important for the scientific community, it helps in particular to reproduce experimental setups. They are unfortunately not valued enough by scientific journals. I want today to highlight such a paper. Liquid crystals phase modulators - and indeed any kind of spatial light modulator (SLM) - are not free of imperfections. One effect that appears is a phase distortion of the reflected field due to spatial non-uniformities that occur during the fabrications. In practice, if you illuminate an SLM with a plane wave and you display a uniform mask, one does not end up with a plane wave, but an aberrated wavefront. In the present paper, the authors use a quite easy to implement technique to retrieve the phase distortion introduced by the SLM.

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Created by sebastien.popoff on 15/11/2019

Tutorials Spatial Light Modulators

About mechanical stability using Vialux DMDs

We have been using DMDs from Vialux for a few years now, and I already published few posts about different effects that need to be taken into account when working with such devices (in particular aberrations and diffraction effects). One more trivial, but potentially troublesome, effect is due to vibrations, that come from the FPGA board and transmitted through the rigid flat cables. In this quick post, I show the damaging effect of vibrations and how to easily get rid of them, at least partially.

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