Design of GRIN laser beam shaping system

Geometrical optics is used for design of gradient-index (GRIN) laser beam shapers with the conditions of conservation of energy and constant optical path length for all rays passing through the system. The exact ray intercepts for a Gaussian to top-hat beam transform at the output plane are the ray trace target values used during the optimization process. After constructing a beam shaping merit function, the commercial software ZEMAX has been used to minimize the merit function for a well known two-element plano-aspheric beam shaper to establish the effectiveness of this new beam shaping merit function. Then, this method is used to design of several GRIN laser beam shapers while using ZEMAX's catalog GRADIUM elements from LightPath glass types. The optical component shape and spacing parameters are also used for optimization variables. Both spherical surfaces and conic surfaces of the different elements of the GRIN laser beam shaper are studied. The ZEMAX software was used for performance analysis of the GRIN beam shapers and is discussed.

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