Design of high-speed phase-only spatial light modulators with two-dimensional tunable microcavity arrays.

Spatial light modulators (SLMs) are central to numerous applications ranging from high-speed displays to adaptive optics, structured illumination microscopy, and holography. After decades of advances, SLM arrays based on liquid crystals can now reach large pixel counts exceeding 106 with phase-only modulation with a pixel pitch of less than 10 µm and reflectance around 75%. However, the rather slow modulation speed in such SLMs (below hundreds of Hz) presents limitations for many applications. Here we propose an SLM architecture that can achieve two-dimensional phase-only modulation at high speed in excess of GHz. The architecture consists of a tunable two-dimensional array of vertically oriented, one-sided microcavities that are tuned through an electro-optic material such as barium titanate (BTO). We calculate that the optimized microcavity design achieves a π phase shift under an applied bias voltage below 10 V, while maintaining nearly constant reflection amplitude. As two model applications, we consider high-speed 2D beam steering as well as beam forming. The outlined design methodology could also benefit future design of spatial light modulators with other specifications (for example amplitude modulators). This high-speed SLM architecture promises a wide range of new applications ranging from fully tunable metasurfaces to optical computing accelerators, high-speed interconnects, true 2D phased array beam steering, and quantum computing with cold atom arrays.