Applications of LCoS-based adaptive optical elements in microscopy

Liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS)-based spatial light modulators (SLMs) are versatile adaptive optical elements. In microscopy, among their applications are aberration sensing and correction in wide-field microscopy and also the implementation of holographic optical tweezers. For aberration correction, the required scene-based wavefront sensing can be implemented as a modified correlation-based Shack-Hartmann approach where a high-resolution SLM first senses and then corrects the aberrations. For the implementation of holographic optical tweezers, the SLM serves as a variable optical beam-splitter which is addressed with holograms computed by fast algorithms implemented on the graphics processing unit (GPU) of a common PC almost in real-time.