Design of optical engines for stellar simulation systems with low extinction ratios

An optical engine (OE) for stellar simulation systems with low extinction ratios (ERs) is proposed. This engine combines two orthogonal polarizers with a non-polarizing beam splitter to suppress the leakage of dark silicon-based liquid crystals (LCOS) in traditional systems. In this paper, a method to calculate the ER based on vector ray tracing is used. The new optical engine (OE) is demonstrated to have lower ERs than traditional systems. The calculations show that the maximum ER is 5×10−5 in the range of ±8°, which is much lower than the ERs of traditional optical engines of 2.5×10−2 . It reduces the ER by three orders of magnitude. The experimental results show that the new OE improves the ERs by 92.68% compared with the traditional system.