Scalable micromesh-digital spatial light modulators

Digital spatial light modulators (SLMs) with small pitch comparable to the wavelength of illuminating light and large physical dimension comparable to consumer displays are highly demanding for realizing realistic digital holography but are impractical due to various technical issues. Previously we proposed the way to overcome these hurdles by scalable SLM-micromesh (mu M) heterostructures utilizing large scale consumer displays and passive binary amplitude mu Ms (AMs). However, a few drawbacks with these heterostructures are identified such as their low power efficiency due to the blocking of light beam diffracted from the SLM by the opaque part of the AM and the brightest zeroth order diffraction beam causing the lower power efficiency at higher diffraction orders. Thus in this paper, we employed scalable binary phase micromeshes (PMs) instead of AMs in the scalable heterostructures. This is able to minimize the power loss and to diminish the zeroth order diffraction beam simultaneously without requiring any time consuming steps. As a result, this allows full utilization of large scale consumer displays for scalable digital holography by employing scalable SLM-mu M heterostructures with negligible power loss. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America