Abstract

Liquid crystal spatial light modulators (SLMs) acting as programmable diffractive elements can be employed to multiplex optical imaging in many ways. Apart from emulating a particular imaging modality, the SLM acts as a beam-splitter sending images that differ e.g. in targeted depth or in the parameter settings for quantitative or multi-modal microscopy to separate regions on the camera chip. We discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach.

© 2013 Optical Society of America