The Conditions of a Holographic Homogenizer to Optimize the Intensity Uniformity

We report on the design of a holographic homogenizer composed of a periodic hologram and a condensing lens. If the hologram is periodic, the homogenizer is free from the alignment error of the incident laser beam. Holographic homogenizer also has an advantage of the flexibility in the size of the target beam. We calculated theoretically the Fraunhofer diffracted wave function when a rectangular laser beam is incident on a periodic hologram. The diffracted wave is the sum of sinc functions at regular distance. The width of each sinc function depends on the size of the incident laser beam and the distance between the sinc functions depends on the period of the hologram. We calculated numerically the diffracted light intensity for various ratios of the size of the incident laser beam to the period of the hologram. The results show that it is possible to make the diffracted beam uniform at a certain value of the ratio. The uniformity is high at the central part of the target area and low near the edge. The more sinc functions are included in the target area, the larger portion of the area becomes uniform and the higher is the uniformity at the central part. Therefore, we can make efficient homogenizer if we design a hologram so that the maximum number of the diffracted beams may be included in the target area.