Practical considerations of producing propagation invariant laser beams
Due to their several unique properties, propagation invariant laser beams (PILBs) are playing an increasingly important role in several photonics applications. This paper describes some practical aspects of producing propagation invariant laser beams with different symmetries and structured light field distributions. Both intra cavity and extra cavity schemes can be employed. In the case of extra cavity implementations, we show several practical layouts of anamorphic optical systems (AOSs) for shaping the propagation invariant laser beams based on the size and waist locations of the input laser beams. We also establish matrix equations required to quantify the influence of input PILBs lateral and angular misalignments with respect to the AOSs onto the spatial characteristics of the produced output PILBs, and present examples of the resulting PILBs affected by the input PILBs misalignments.
SPIE Optical Engineering Applications