High capacity optical encryption system using ferro-electric spatial light modulators

We have implemented an optical system suitable for the high-speed encryption of digital data. Our approach uses polarization encoding of a wavefront in conjunction with ferro-electric spatial light modulators to produce a generic optical encryption and decryption system theoretically capable of operating at data communication rates. We present a detailed analysis of the polarization encoding technique and provide results from encryption and decryption experiments demonstrating that a pixel-to-pixel mapping approach provides a robust yet simple to implement architecture for optical encryption.