Optical beam shaping design through optimization of a radial phase mask

Laser beams shaped into flattop are widely used in various industrial and medical applications. There are various approaches to produce a flattop beam from a Gaussian beam. In this paper, a novel approach called Method of Projection is used to optimize a single element Radial phase mask to obtain flattop output beam. In this approach, Henkel transform and cross-correlation in iterative loop is used to optimize the parameters. Following this approach, a suitable phase mask pattern is obtained in grayscale. The simulated results are compared with target intensity profile through cross-correlation and further optimized to reach certain goodness value. The designed algorithm is a single element radially symmetric phase mask, which is low cost, alignment-free and robust. Hence, the proposed approach reduces the number of components required to develop a flattop output.