High-Speed Near-Wavelength Spatial Light Modulators with Two-Dimensional Tunable Microcavity Arrays

A reflective spatial light modulator (SLM) made of an electro-optic material, such as barium titanate, in a one-sided Fabry-Perot resonator can provide phase and/or amplitude modulation with fine spatial resolution at speeds over a Gigahertz; light is confined laterally within the electrooptic material/resonator layer stack with microlenses, index perturbations, or by patterning the layer stack into a two-dimensional (2D) array of vertically oriented micropillars; in phase-only modulation mode, each pixel in the SLM can produce a 7T phase shift under a bias voltage below 10 V, while maintaining nearly constant reflection amplitude; the methodology for designing this SLM could also be used to design other SLMs (for example, amplitude-only SLMs): this high-speed SLM can be used in a wide range of new applications, from fully tunable metasurfaces to optical computing accelerators, high-speed interconnects, true 2D phased array beam steering, beam forming, or quantum computing with cold atom arrays.