Global beam shaping with nonuniformly polarized beams: a proposal

A procedure for global beam shaping by modifying some global spatial parameters characteristic of the beam is proposed. This method is based on the generation of a nonuniformly polarized beam using a Mach-Zehnder system with two suitably shaped intensity transmittances and orthogonal linear polarizers. The changes in beam quality and kurtosis parameters after a linear polarizer placed at the output of the system are investigated.