Measuring the spatial deformation of a liquid-crystal on silicon display with a self-interference effect

We present a simple technique to characterize the spatial non-uniformity of a liquid-crystal on silicon (LCOS) spatial light modulator (SLM). It is based on illuminating the display with a wavelength out of the operation range, so there is a significant reflection at the output surface. As a consequence, a Gires–Tournois interferometer is directly created, without any alignment requirement and insensitive to vibrations. The beam reflected at the output surface is the reference beam, while the beam reflected at the silicon backplane is modulated with the addressed gray level in order to quantitatively derive its deformation. We provide an experimental demonstration using a LCOS-SLM designed to operate in the near-infrared range but illuminated with visible light.