  We manipulate a Bose-Einstein condensate using the optical trap created by
the diffraction of a laser beam on a fast ferro-electric liquid crystal spatial
light modulator. The modulator acts as a phase grating which can generate
arbitrary diffraction patterns and be rapidly reconfigured at rates up to 1 kHz
to create smooth, time-varying optical potentials. The flexibility of the
device is demonstrated with our experimental results for splitting a
Bose-Einstein condensate and independently transporting the separate parts of
the atomic cloud.
