Laser beams apodization by light scattering

Summary form only given. One of the recent achievements on the way of increasing of the output power and brightness of CW and pulse-repetitive solid-state and gaseous lasers was the application of apodized and adaptive mirrors in unstable resonators of lasers, which provide an effective single-mode laser operation with super-Gaussian profiles of the intensity distributions. The optical elements with apodized transmission profiles("soft diaphragms") are also used in high-power laser facilities for ICF experiments." The possibility of laser beams apodization by means of light scattering in media with small inhomogeneities (cloudy media) is discussed in this report. The medium of the proposed apodizer must be transparent for the laser emission wavelength /spl lambda/ and must contain small-size (/spl rho//spl ges//spl lambda/) inhomogeneities that predominantly scatter (not absorb) the laser radiation.