Impact of aberrations in SLM-based far-field holography

Abstract We use camera-in-the-loop calibration to calibrate a phase-only spatial light modulator (SLM) in a far-field hologram setup. The recorded intensity distributions achieve a high degree of consistency with the calculated results, indicating a precise calibration and sufficient modeling of the most prominent aberrations. In this work, we discuss the modeled aberrations and examine the improvement or loss in image quality and diffraction efficiency that is obtained by including or excluding the modeled aberrations in the calibration. We further show the influence of aberrations on speckle-reduced holograms and evaluate the speckle contrast.