Design of diffractive optical elements for shaping the laser intensity distribution

Abstract

We present simple designs of diffractive optical elements for generating high quality laser beams of different spatial shapes with uniform intensity distribution. The numerical results are presented for uniform intensity laser beams with annular, rectangular and square spatial shapes. We found that these beams exhibit small depth of focus (propagation distance over which the shape of a beam remains preserved). We also found that our designs have good tolerance against the possible errors caused by imperfections and noise