Enhancement of performance of interference nano-patterning techniques by beam shaping optics Available to Purchase

Performance of industrial holographic and interferometric techniques is essentially enhanced by providing a light beam with flat phase front and flat-top irradiance distribution; this is important in interference lithography, computer-generated holography, holographic data storage, interferometric recording of Bragg Gratings. Therefore transformation of Gaussian distribution of a TEM₀₀ laser to flat-top (top hat, uniform) distribution is an important technical task. There are different refractive and diffractive beam shaping approaches used in laser industrial and scientific applications, but only few of them are capable to fulfil the optimum conditions for beam quality demanding holography and interferometry. As a solution it is suggested to apply refractive field mapping beam shaping optics πShaper, which operational principle presumes almost lossless transformation of Gaussian to flat-top beam with flatness of output wavefront, conserving of beam consistency, providing collimated low divergent output beam, high transmittance, extended depth of field, negligible wave aberration, and achromatic design provides capability to work with several lasers with different wavelengths simultaneously. High optical quality of resulting flat-top beam allows applying additional optical components to build various imaging optical systems for variation of beam size and shape to fulfill requirements of a particular application. This paper will describe design basics of refractive beam shapers and optical layouts of their applying in holographic systems. Examples of real implementations and experimental results will be presented as well.