Calibration of the pixel crosstalk in spatial light modulators for 4f pulse shaping

The targeted shaping of femtosecond pulses in 4f pulse shapers is complicated by, among other factors, the crosstalk between adjacent pixels of a spatial light modulator (SLM). Current methods for the crosstalk evaluation require setting up a different experiment, which is highly inconvenient. Here, we propose a simple procedure to extract the pixel crosstalk within the standard SLM calibration used in pulse shaping. The calibration is based on an analysis of the contrast of a periodic modulation in the spectra induced via SLM. We demonstrate the calibration procedure on a liquid-crystal-based SLM and show that we attain a constant crosstalk effect represented by a Gaussian function with σ=1.0 pix over a broad operational range of the SLM.