Adaptive Beam Shaping - Department of Engineering Physics

Funded by the German Ministry of Research and Technology (BMBF) under contract FKZ 1706700, Strahlformung von Diodenlasern mit adaptiver Optik.

Fig. 1: Collimation of a diode bar without smile (top) and with smile (bottom). The smile leads to aberrations of the laser beam which can be seen in the wave optics picture as a twist of the wavefront (crosshatched) and in the ray optics picture as a "squinting" of different areas of the beam (rightmost).

Goals of this project were to improve the beam quality of a high-power diode laser bar by means of an adaptive mirror and to create a homogeneous intensity distribution of a high-power diode laser stack. Diode lasers have very low manufacturing and operating costs when compared to optically-pumped solid state lasers. Therefore, they are of great economic importance.

However, a disadvantage of diode lasers is their low beam quality. In this project we wanted to show in proof-of-principle experiments that the beam quality of diode laser bars can be improved and that homogeneous intensity distributions can be created.