Flat-top beam is widely used in laser applications such as holography, material processing, and nuclear fusion. However, it is difficult to maintain the flat-top effect over long distances due to the limitations of wavefront modulation and natural diffraction effects. This study aims to shape a circular Gaussian beam into a canonical flat-top beam and preserve its flat-top characteristics during long-distance (meter-level) transmission. Based on the principle of energy conservation, an energy mapping relationship between the incident plane and the output plane is constructed, and a circular flat-top intensity distribution is obtained at the output plane. The wavefront quality of the outgoing beam is controlled by the principle of equivalent optical length between mapping point elements. An off-axis reflective free-form surface optical shaping system is designed. The incident Gaussian beam has a spectral range of 1060±15nm, a beam waist diameter of 40mm, an energy truncation diameter of 60mm, and a beam quality β of 3. After the shaping system, a flat-top beam is shaped at the position of 5m output plane behind the mirror. The energy uniformity is more than 95% and the energy utilization rate is more than 90% within the diameter of 60mm. The flat-top effect can be maintained within 10m. The results show that this system can effectively shape and transmit a flat-top beam over long distances. This study provides a novel and practical method for flat-top beam shaping and transmission, which has potential applications in various laser fields.
Infrared polarization imaging can achieve faster perception speed and higher identification accuracy, which has been widely applied in diverse areas such as space remote sensing, biomedicine, and object detection. Limited by the aperture of the lens, the single-aperture imaging system can hardly meet the needs of high-resolution and multi-polarization imaging simultaneously. Aiming at achieving the properties of high-resolution, high-integration, and multi-channel performance, a sub-aperture infrared polarization imaging system based on freeform surfaces is proposed and demonstrated. The general scheme of the polarization imaging system mainly consists of a common aperture structure, a sub-aperture imaging group, and a relay imaging group. To compress the beam aperture, a Kepler telescope configuration is employed to build up the imaging objective. The field diaphragm is set at the primary image plane to effectively eliminate stray light. Polarizers with different orientations are added to the split aperture imaging group to form four polarization state channels. To reduce the assembly errors of the sub-aperture system, a freeform surface lens is utilized to replace the lens group in the multi-channel. The freeform surface profile uses the "XY polynomial" with eight coefficients. A diaphragm array is arranged on the front surface of the sub-aperture system, which is used to avoid the intersection between the image planes of different channels. To match with the cooled detector, the relay imaging group is designed as a finite conjugate structure with a magnification of -0.44×. The structure allows for simultaneous imaging of four infrared polarization states with the same system, and the MTF of each channel at 33lp/mm is higher than 0.45. Our research satisfies both miniaturization and engineering application requirements.
Wavefront-based aspheric metrology techniques generally require a compensation lens to compensate for the primary aberrations. To expand the adaptability of the surface to be tested, this paper proposes and demonstrates a partial null compensator structure that can switch between the front and back mirror sides. The presented compensator comprises two sets of off-axis reflecting parts and a pre-compensation spheric lens in an integrated structure. An appropriate off-axis reflection combination mode can be selected for the range of the conic coefficient of the measured surface. With the simulation result, the presented compensator can adapt to a large-scale variation of the surface conic coefficient K from -10 to +10. The average residual wavefront aberration is no more than 1λ (PV) and 1/4 λ (RMS). The results show that the proposed structure can be efficiently applied to wavefront detection or interferometer for data post-processing.
Optical phase correlation calculation can achieve high-speed, passive, high-signal-to-noise ratio target signal detection. This paper proposes and demonstrates a one-dimensional information parallel comparison system based on an optical correlator. The system uses 4-f optical architecture as the basic device and combines multiple optical modules such as beam shaping, wavefront phase modulation, and optical phase correlation calculation to achieve the parallel computing function with one-dimensional information as the main detection object is developed, and the feasibility of the comparison calculation is verified by simulation. The detection system based on optical correlation proposed in this paper has potential application value in the field of genetic detection.
Aiming at correcting the severe chromatic aberration of the long focal lens, the traditional optical design often requires employing complex structure, introducing special dispersive glasses or even utilizing the hybrid refractive-diffractive imaging method. However, complex structure will bring several drawbacks such as large volume and heavy weight. Special glasses and refractive-diffractive hybrid imaging will greatly increase the cost, which hardly meets the needs of miniaturization and low cost of optical imaging module. Although image restoration algorithm is commonly used to optimize the image quality to a certain extent, the optical design and image restoration process are independent of each other. Therefore, it is difficult to ensure the high resolution of the image while realizing the light weight, small volume and low cost of the optical system simultaneously. Utilizing the computational imaging theory, a simple long-focus optical system design method based on the optical/image co-design is proposed and deomonstrated in this paper. On the basis of the idea of global optimization, the reported approach considers the two independent links of optical design and image restoration as a combination. The imaging quality requirements in the optical system design are relaxed at the front end, and the image restoration algorithm is used to remove the residual aberrations in the back end. This method can not only obtain the same or even higher imaging performance, but also reduce the complexity of the optical system.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.