Review: design and analysis of plano-aspheric laser beam shapers

A review of the design and analysis of plano-aspheric laser beam shapers is presented. Both the Galilean and Keplerian configurations of the two aspheric lens laser beam shaper have been used and offer benefits for different applications. The geometrical optics based design methods of Kreuzer have been used to obtain a uniform output irradiance distribution with a gradual roll-off from the uniform to null region, which increases the distance over which the uniform irradiance distribution can be used. The flattened Lorentzian function is used to represent the shaped beam profile and offers benefits of working with an analytic expression for the ray mapping function between the two plano-aspheric lenses when using an input Gaussian beam.