Phase-only liquid crystal spatial light modulator for wavefront correction with high precision.

We introduce a novel parallel-aligned liquid-crystal (LC) spatial light modulator (SLM) that has been designed to operate in a phase-only mode for wave-front correction. We measured and analyzed theoretically the electro-optic characteristics of the LC SLM and obtained a peak-to-valley value of 0.07049lambda(lambda= 0.6328microm) after correction. A Strehl ratio of 0.989 indicates the approximate upper limit of an aberrated wave front that the LC SLM can correct when it is used in an adaptive optical system.