Piston-only spatial light modulators, such as the flexure-beam deformable mirror device, hold great promise for real-time optical processors because of their ability to accurately match the phase of arbitrary laser images. Non- ideal devices may have uncontrolled phase errors which can limit performance. A statistical analysis has been developed which models the effect of random piston and tilt errors on the diffraction pattern of phase-only SLMs. A slight modification of these equations describes the performance of these SLMs in the phase-only correlator and the phase-only correlator modulated by pseudo-random sequences. Results on correlator diffraction efficiency versus amount of phase error are presented. For the specific case of a binary phase-only matched filter a diffraction efficiency of 40.5% is found.
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