Numerical model of diffraction effects of pixelated phase-only spatial light modulators

In this work, we investigate numerical models of selected spatial light modulators (SLMs) to provide an accurate simulation of diffractive effects present in optoelectronic hologram reconstruction, i.e. DC term and higher orders. We focus on reported most influential parameters: (a) fill factor, (b) amplitude modulation of dead space (effect of surface structure between adjacent pixels), (c) phase of dead space (phase modulation profile between adjacent pixels), (d) spatial influence of adjacent pixels on phase modulation value, and (e) number of phase quantization levels. The impact of each factor on modeled diffraction efficiency and orders distribution is investigated. We consider phase-only reflective models of LCoS SLMs on the basis of commercially available architectures. Additionally, the pixelated SLM model is tested on the example of two practical cases.