Direct phase hologram calculation method for an effective complex light structuring

Nowadays, structured light has an enormous amount of applications in almost all fields of science, and each of them requires a tool for efficient and accurate creation of arbitrary field distributions. In particular, the problem of creating Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes is of some interest in the context of complex light dynamics in multimode fiber or wireless optical communication with the use of orbital angular momentum. Here we proposed a new, to the best of our knowledge, method for efficient structured light generation using widely used phase-only spatial light modulators. Directly calculated holograms using a numerically optimized modulation function allow obtaining both LG modes with high purity and arbitrary field distributions. It has been shown experimentally that the accuracy of the generated beam shapes is almost the same as for classical methods based on Jacobi-Anger expansion, whereas the efficiency is two or three times higher and reaches 15% for the first six modes. We also demonstrate that our method allows us to control the phase properties of the field with a deviation of less than 1%. The method also has a great variability that can be used to get the most optimal holograms depending on the kind of generated field required in a particular application.