Patent attributes
A modulation optical system (40) provides modulation of an incident light beam. A wire grid polarization beamsplitter (240) receives the beam of light (130) and transmits a beam of light having a first polarization, and reflects a beam of light having a second polarization orthogonal to the first polarization. Sub-wavelength wires (250) on the wire grid polarization beamsplitter face a reflective spatial light modulator. The reflective spatial light modulator receives the polarized beam of light and selectively modulates the polarized beam of light to encode data thereon. The reflective spatial light modulator reflects back both the modulated light and the unmodulated light to the wire grid polarization beamsplitter. The wire grid polarization beamsplitter separates the modulated light from the unmodulated light. A compensator (260) is located between the wire grid polarization beamsplitter and the reflective spatial light modulator (210). The compensator conditions the polarization states of the oblique and skew rays of the modulated beam and includes a spatially variant retardance that corrects for a spatially variant retardance of the reflective spatial light modulator.
