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Applied optics

Enhancing spatiotemporal light modulators

Nature Photonics volume 16, pages 818–820 (2022)Cite this article

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The free-carrier dispersion effect with photo-excited free carriers provides all-optical control of the resonance of photonic crystal microcavities. Using this technique, a spatial light modulator comprising optically addressed cavity arrays has been developed for high-efficiency, high-bandwidth spatiotemporal modulation of light.

Spatiotemporal modulation of light in free space with sufficiently high space-bandwidth products is critical for free-space optical systems. Enhancing this performance metric in spatial light modulators (SLMs) has been an ongoing endeavour with a significant impact on mature applications such as optical displays and projectors, lithography, communications, sensing and emerging applications such as optical neural networks, quantum computing, communications and metrology. Maximizing the fill factor in the active area of a spatiotemporal light modulator poses significant engineering challenges due to routing constraints1, optical crosstalk2 and fabrication limitations3. Commercial SLMs achieve near-unity fill factors but fail to achieve high-modulation bandwidths (>MHz), reducing the number of degrees of freedom controllable by the SLM.

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Fig. 1: Demonstrated SLM and its measured specifications.

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  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Volkan Gurses

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  1. Volkan Gurses
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Correspondence to Volkan Gurses.

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Gurses, V. Enhancing spatiotemporal light modulators. Nat. Photon. 16, 818–820 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01087-8

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