Modification of the reconstruction distance of Fresnel holograms for display with multiple spatial light modulators

Abstract

In digital holography, spatial light modulators (SLMs) devices are used to display the holographic patterns. However, modulation is imperfect because SLMs cannot modulate phase and amplitude at the same time. Then undesired terms such as twin image can be observed in the image plane. One solution to remove twin image contribution without physical spatial filter is to perform complex modulation. Phase and amplitude modulation can be performed sequentially with two different SLMs. Similarly, real and imaginary part of hologram can be displayed and combined in an additive configuration through a polarizing beam splitter. In both case, a major problem is the alignment of the two display devices since misalignment as small as one pixel may degrade significantly quality of the reconstruction. For our experiment, we used data computed numerically to obtain separately real and imaginary part of hologram. Then, we focused on additive configuration where two SLMs are displaying real and imaginary part of hologram respectively. Reconstruction distance of hologram is fixed and distance between SLM and beam splitter should be the same for the two devices. In this paper, we study the effect of having different reconstruction distance for the real and imaginary hologram. We performed simulations and explained the result with the scalar diffraction theory. A method to compensate numerically the reconstruction distance is proposed for on-axis configuration. This method can also be applied to modify reconstruction distance of Fresnel hologram displayed with a single SLM and has potential application in RGB holographic reconstruction.