Bacteriorhodopsin spatial light modulators for optical processing applications

Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) is an organically-based material that exhibits many desirable properties for use as a real-time optically addressed spatial light modulator for optical processing applications. Potential applications for BR include real-time holography for optical correlation, reconfigurable optical interconnects, optical data storage, and phase correction in a one-way coherent imaging situation. We discuss an experiment conducted to accomplish the latter application, in which BR offers the prospect of a real-time, high-resolution, thin hologram with which to record the phase aberration information. Image beams that pass through the same aberrating medium are diffracted by the hologram in such a way as to cancel out the effects of the aberration, and thus recreate the original unaberrated image-bearing wavefront. If the phase aberrations are changing at a rate comparable to the exposure/erase cycle of the BR holograms, then this technique could be used to obtain high-quality images through a time-varying aberration