Simulation of Light Diffraction at Pixels of a Spatial Light Modulator

The performance of diffractive optical elements can be affected by several different factors. Nowadays, SLMs are often employed as programmable diffractive optical elements. As an example, a Gaussian-to-top-hat diffractive beam shaper is implemented by using a SLM. Due to fabrication limitation, there is always gaps amongst the pixels of a SLM, which may cause undesired diffractions. Such effects are investigated in VirtualLab Fusion, and especially, the influence on the final beam shaping results is analyzed.