A 10 Megahertz Spatial Light Modulator

Rapid and programmable shaping of light fields is central to modern microscopy, display technologies, optical communications and sensing, quantum engineering, and quantum information processing.

Current wavefront shaping technologies face a fundamental dichotomy: liquid-crystal-on-silicon spatial light modulators (LCoS-SLMs) offer high pixel count but suffer from low refresh rates, while acousto-optic deflectors (AODs) provide moderate speed with restricted optical beam geometries.

Though recent advances in photonic integrated circuits achieve fast switching, there is currently no tool that provides MHz-rate, continuous motion, and arbitrarily reconfigurable control over a set of diffraction-limited spots.

Here we introduce a new class of spatial light modulator that provides both 2D pixel geometry and high speed.

The device operates by encoding spatial information in frequency bins via a broadband optical phase modulator, and decoding them via a first-of-its-kind, high-resolution 2D spectrometer.

The spectrometer, based on the architecture which we call the Re-Imaging Phased Array (RIPA), achieves its sensitivity through long path-lengths, enabled by intra-spectrometer re-imaging lens-guides.

We demonstrate site-resolved optical pulsing with a 44(1)~ns rise time, corresponding to frame rates exceeding 10 million frames per second, as well as arbitrary, reconfigurable 2D addressing and multi-site operations, including asynchronous, independent beam motion, splitting, and recombination.

Leveraging these tools opens new horizons in rapid optical manipulation of matter across science, from fast, scalable control that approaches the inertial and radiation limits of atoms in quantum processors, to dynamically programmable, microsecond-resolved illumination in microscopy and neuro-biological imaging.