Improving the beam quality factor (M2) by phase-only reshaping of structured light
Abstract
Laser brightness is crucial in many optical processes, and is optimized by high power, high beam quality (low M 2 ) beams. Here we show how to improve the laser beam quality factor (reducing the M 2 ) of arbitrary structured light fields in a lossless manner using continuous phase-only elements, thus allowing for the increase in brightness by a simple linear optical transformation. We demonstrate the principle with four high M 2 initial beams, converting each to a Gaussian ( M 2 ≈ 1 ) with a dramatic increase in brightness of > 10 × . This work puts a new (to the best of our knowledge) perspective on the old debate of improving laser beam quality with binary diffractive optics, while providing a practical approach to enhancing laser brightness for arbitrary input beams.
- Publication:
-
Optics Letters
- Pub Date:
- July 2020
- DOI:
- 10.1364/OL.397493
- arXiv:
- arXiv:2005.05168
- Bibcode:
- 2020OptL...45.3753S
- Keywords:
-
- Physics - Optics
- E-Print:
- doi:10.1364/OL.397493