Laser Beam Shaping with Membrane Deformable Mirrors

The performance of laser machining systems can often be improved by adjusting the intensity profile of the beam on the target. Shaping a laser intensity profile can be efficiently accomplished by adjusting the spatial phase of the beam before propagating the beam a distance to the target. Beam shaping can be accomplished with passive diffractive elements, but this technique is only capable of creating a single intensity profile and is usually very sensitive to the input beam characteristics. Beam shaping with active optical elements like deformable mirrors can enable the system to achieve multiple shapes and compensate for non-ideal input beams, but can be very expensive. We present here a demonstration of laser beam shaping with low-cost membrane deformable mirrors.