Beam shapers

Dalgety Bay, UK - PowerPhotonic will be showcasing its new beam shaper technology for high-power laser applications at Photonics West in San Francisco in early February. The beam shaper optics give a flexible choice of beam profile with a single thin optical element, which copes with high peak power, is ultra-efficient, and is insensitive to the input beam characteristics.

PowerPhotonic will be presenting a SPIE Photonics West conference paper on its new beam shapers at "Session 3: Beam Guiding, Shaping, and Analysis for High-Power Applications."

“Our unique freeform refractive micro-optics offer alternatives to microlens arrays and diffractive optical elements for beam shaping of high-power lasers. Our beam shapers provide ultra-efficient beam transformation with minimal loss of brightness, and offer greater flexibility in the range of beam profiles that can be generated than any other refractive technology available today,” commented Roy McBride, MD of PowerPhotonic.

PowerPhotonic will also be showcasing its new LightForge low cost rapid fabrication service for micro-optics and presenting a paper on it at the conference. In Session 7 on "Laser Processing of Novel Structures and Complex Shapes," the company reports on how the LightForge process can be used to realize a complex custom optic using data generated directly from a design in Zemax. This surface is then extracted from Zemax and fabricated using the LightForge service before being measured. A quantitative analysis of the real optic is carried out both numerically and with the design source in Zemax, and a comparison is presented between design and fabricated part performance.

In addition to the LightForge fabrication service and the new beam shaper optics, the PowerPhotonic team will be on-hand to discuss the complete range of micro-optics in the North Hall, Booth 5319C.