Imaging technologies are ubiquitous, helping us monitoring our health, exploring our environment and in our telecommunications. At the heart of every optical imaging technology lies a component responsible for shaping the light beam in a spatial pattern according to an electrical or optical input. The incident light can be modulated in its phase, intensity, polarization, or direction, originated by various electro-optic or magneto-optic effects and by materials that modulate light by surface deformation. The most enduring, and continuously evolving, component in charge of this light modulation is the Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). The SLMs were originally developed for use as digital display screen technology, where large arrays of individual electronically addressable pixels must rapidly modulate light by some physical means to produce an image (an analogue is digital light projectors for feature films and presentations). Perhaps the most familiar example of this technology is the liquid crystal display (LCD), where electronic control of the liquid crystal orientation allows control of optical polarization, and, in combination with a polarizer, amplitude modulation of a backlight.
The major limitations in current imaging technologies are speed and resolution, and both impediments are originated by how the light is modulated in the device. Limitations in resolution have been overcome by several methods, some of them even deserving the Nobel prize, however the speed at which the spatial modulation of light is shaped remains limited by the refresh rate of current SLMs, which is of the order of 100kHz for the best of the devices. This is because SLMs and similar components operate sequentially, that is to say, they shape the light beam in different patterns but the time interval between patterns is limited by the refresh rate of the device. In Dynamo we will develop a breakthrough technology that will send all the possible patterns of the device simultaneously, and encoded in a short pulse of one nanosecond, creating the concept of parallel beam shaping or dynamic spatio-temporal light modulation device.
To give an idea of the magnitude of this breakthrough, we compare this improvement in the time to process images with the improvement in the clock frequency of computers: the first general purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, had a clock frequency of 100kHz in 1945. It was not until 2000 where AMD reached the 1 GHz in their computers. Processing images is broadly similar to processing data in general, so this is indicative of a jump forwards of fifty years in the realm of imaging; the outcomes from this project offer to accelerate imaging technologies and place European science and industry at the forefront of the inventions and advances that will follow.
