Masters Thesis Defense - Encoding Amplitude and Phase Information at the Nyquist Frequency Onto a Phase-Only Spatial Light Modulator

Who: Brian Slovick

Time: 1:00pm, Tuesday 31st July, 2007

Place: P-250

Abstract: We obtain phase-only modulation with a twisted nematic liquid crystal display. In addition, we report a new method for encoding amplitude and phase information onto a single liquid-crystal spatial light modulator.

In general, twisted nematic liquid crystal displays produce coupled amplitude and phase modulation as a function of the applied voltage. We obtain phase-only modulation by generating and detecting a linear combination of the elliptically-polarized eigenvectors for the device. In previous work, it has been shown that complex functions can be encoded onto a single phase-only filter by spatially modulating the diffraction efficiency of the carrier phase. In our approach, we spatially modulate the diffraction efficiency at the Nyquist frequency in order to encode large objects and quickly varying amplitude functions.

You can view other thesis abstracts here.