Refractive Field Mapping Beam Shapers Research Articles

Characterization of flat-fielding systems for quantitative microscopy.

Optical flat-fielding systems, such as field-mapping or integration-based beam shapers, are used to transform nonuniform illumination into uniform illumination. Thus, flat-fielding paves the way for imaging that is independent of position within a field of view and enables more quantitative analysis. Here, we characterize and compare three systems for homogenizing both widefield and multifocal illumination. Our analysis includes two refractive field-mapping beam shapers: PiShaper and TopShape, as well as one integration-based: Köhler integrator. The comparison is based on figures of merit including ISO-standard values, such as the plateau uniformity and edge steepness, transmission efficiency, stability of the beams along propagation and multifocal intensity, pitch, and point width. By characterizing and comparing existing beam shapers, we facilitate the choice of the appropriate flat-fielding solution and increase their accessibility for different applications.

Solutions for Beam Shaping

AbstractGrowing popularity of high power lasers in material processing is accompanied with variety of demands to control the laser intensity profile and spot shape. The applications like metal or plastics welding, cladding, selective laser melting, hardening, brazing, annealing get benefits from providing flattop or inverse‐Gauss intensity distribution of a laser spot with round, elliptical or linear shape. The complexity of requirements is also increased due to variety of laser sources: solid‐state, diode or fiber lasers can be TEM00 or multimode, free space or fiber‐coupled, CW or pulsed, the laser power spans from few watts to several kW. To meet these requirements the up‐to‐date beam shaping solutions can be built on the base of the field mapping refractive beam shapers like πShaper, which operational principle implies transformation of laser intensity distribution from Gaussian to flattop, super‐Gauss, or inverse‐Gauss, conserving of beam consistency, low divergence of collimated output beam, high transmittance, extended depth of field, capability to operate with TEM00 or multimode lasers, implementations as telescopes or collimators. This article describes basic principles and important features of refractive beam shapers as well as some optical layouts that can be built on their base to meet requirements of modern laser technologies.