Higher orders enhancement in gratings produced by a vertically aligned LCoS

Typically, a 360º phase-shift is required to implement diffractive optical elements (DOEs) in modern photonics applications. However, the possibility of showing much larger phase-shifts is a very appealing property which provides additional degrees of freedom to produce multiplexed functions onto DOEs. On the other hand, modern liquid crystal on silicon devices (LCoS) add real-time programmability to the functionality of the DOE displayed, but this has been typically demonstrated by parallel-aligned LCoS (PA-LCoS) devices. We show programmable DOEs produced using vertically-aligned LCoS (VA-LCoS) devices, with a phase-shift range largely exceeding 360º. We show some results dealing with blazed gratings and on the analysis of their higher diffraction orders, validating their use for multiorder diffractive optical elements.