SBIR OSW26BZ04-DV012 (Office of the Secretary of Defense): High-speed nanophotonic spatial light modulators

About this archived opportunity

Office of the Secretary of Defense SBIR topic — under DoW SBIR 2026 BAA (Solicitation 26.BZ, Release 4) — Accepting submissions 2026-07-22 to 2026-08-19. Objective: The objective of this project is to develop a nanophotonic-enabled spatial light modulator array with modulation a few orders (>10X) faster than the state-of-the-art commercial technologies Description: Adaptive optics (AO), with wavefront sensors and deformable mirrors based on spatial light modulators (SLMs) has been used for active laser beam control and propagation path compensation. The liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) is the most mature technology used for SLMs. But it suffers from a slow response time of tens to hundreds of milliseconds (~ kHz). Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS)-based movable micromirrors, known as digital micromirror device (DMD) or deformable mirror (DM) technology, offer faster spatial light modulation typically at 10 kHz to low MHz. However, the absence of compact and inexpensive SLMs that can freely modulate the wavefront of light at a high speed is hindering the widespread adoption of popular technologies such as LiDAR (light detection and ranging), free-space laser communications, quantum sensing, imaging, etc. The advances in nanophotonics and integrated photonic technologies offer new opportunities to address these grand challenges in adaptive optics by providing compact, high-speed, and high-performance reconfigurable metasurfaces and SLMs with capabilities for amplitude and phase modulation. Keywords: Adaptive optics, Advanced materials, Microelectronics, Metamaterials, Nanophotonics, Photonic crystals, Quantum sensing, Spatial light modulator (SLM).