Grayscale-phase calibration of liquid crystal spatial light modulator with vortex-grating lateral-shearing interferometry

Abstract Liquid crystal spatial light modulators (LC-SLMs) are widely used in optics, and grayscale-phase calibration can effectively improve their modulation accuracy. The most commonly used grayscale-phase calibration method is based on the displacement of interference fringes, which is susceptible to environmental interference and only uses a part of the LC-SLM area. In this paper, vortex-grating lateral-shearing interferometry is introduced into the grayscale-phase calibration, which can theoretically obtain the phase information of the full pixel on the LC-SLM. The self-reference experiment not only carries out the grayscale-phase calibration, but also proves the effectiveness of our proposed method by Twyman–Green interferogram between the reference beam and the vortex beam produced by LC-SLM. High-precision grayscale-phase calibration of LC-SLM can open up some new application scenarios in the future.