Flattop Beam Shaping Using Hybrid Gratings

A new method of laser beam shaping with hybrid gratings is presented. The hybrid gratings consist of a blazed grating and a gradient binary grating. The blazed grating is used to separate the incident Gaussian beam into zero order and nonzero diffraction orders. A filter is used to block the nonzero order beams and obtain the zero orders with the desired shape. The gradient binary grating is used to improve the energy distribution of the inside area of the geometric shape. A phase hologram designed with the desired shape and hybrid gratings, is loaded on a phase-only spatial light modulation to achieve arbitrary geometric flattop shapes with high uniformity. Squared and hexagonal shaping experiments demonstrated that the presented method can convert a Gaussian beam into a flattop beam with steepness edge and high uniformity. Experimental results show that the beam non-uniformity is less than 0.037.