Graphic processing unit accelerated real-time partially coherent beam generator

• A GPU is used to improve the method to generate partially coherent beams, which is the first real-time partially coherent beam generator.
• A real-time generation method is used to improve the general inconvenient procedure to generate the partially coherent beam.
• An optimizing method with partition convolution and parallel sequential are used to improve the generating speed.

A method of using liquid-crystals (LCs) to generate a partially coherent beam in real-time is described. An expression for generating a partially coherent beam is given and calculated using a graphic processing unit (GPU), i.e., the GeForce GTX 680. A liquid-crystal on silicon (LCOS) with 256×256256×256 pixels is used as the partially coherent beam generator (PCBG). An optimizing method with partition convolution is used to improve the generating speed of our LC PCBG. The total time needed to generate a random phase map with a coherence width range from 0.015 mm to 1.5 mm is less than 2.4 ms for calculation and readout with the GPU; adding the time needed for the CPU to read and send to LCOS with the response time of the LC PCBG, the real-time partially coherent beam (PCB) generation frequency of our LC PCBG is up to 312 Hz. To our knowledge, it is the first real-time partially coherent beam generator. A series of experiments based on double pinhole interference are performed. The result shows that to generate a laser beam with a coherence width of 0.9 mm and 1.5 mm, with a mean error of approximately 1%, the RMS values needed 0.021306 and 0.020883 and the PV values required 0.073576 and 0.072998, respectively.