This paper is a review of the theory-of laser beams and resonators. It is meant to be tutorial in nature and useful in scope. No attempt is made to be exhaustive in the treatment. Rather, emphasis is placed on formulations and derivations which lead to basic understanding and on results which bear practical significance.

Laser resonator configurations for obtaining pure azimuthal and radial polarized beams are presented. They involve the coherent summation, inside the laser resonator, of two orthogonally polarized TEM01 modes. Basic principles and experimental results with a Nd:YAG laser are presented. The results include a full space variant polarization measurement and show efficient formation of high-quality...

Weak surface reflections from a simple lens can be used to observe interferences between collimated and focusing laser beams. The superimposed beams ͑one resulting from a double reflection within the lens͒ can be made to have similar intensities near the focus of the weaker beam by choosing the lens prescription and the divergence of the incident laser. An advantage to this inexpensive setup is i...

Phenomena of nonlinear light-matter interaction that occur during the propagation of intense ultrashort laser pulses in continuous media have been extensively studied in ultrafast optical science. In this vibrant research field, conversion of the input laser beam into optical filament(s) is commonly encountered. Here, we demonstrate generation of distinctive single or double super-luminescent o...

The laser triangulation method is one of the most advanced methods for large inner diameter measurement. Our research group proposed a kind of inner diameter measuring device that is principally composed of three laser displacement sensors known to be fixed in the same plane measurement position. It is necessary to calibrate the direction of the laser beams that are emitted by laser displacemen...

We report on a technique for making high-throughput residual stress measurements on thin films by means of micromachined cantilever beams and an array of parallel laser beams. In this technique, the film of interest is deposited onto a silicon substrate with micromachined cantilever beams. The residual stress in the film causes the beams to bend. The curvature of the beams, which is proportiona...

Nondiffracting Bessel beams have been recently applied to single shot ultrafast laser processing of high aspect ratio nanochannels. We review the principles and benefits of nondiffracting Bessel beams for material processing, and we compare experimental results with numerical simulations. We show how the stationarity of nonlinear propagation of ultrafast laser pulses allows high aspect ratio ma...

A femtosecond single-bunch electron linear accelerator based on a photocathode rf gun was developed in Osaka University for the study of radiation-induced ultrafast physical and chemical reactions. A 32 MeV single electron bunch with bunch length of 98 fs in rms was generated successfully with a magnet bunch compressor, and was used as pump source to study the electroninduced ultrafast reaction...

Laser cooling of stored 24Mg ion beams recently led to the long anticipated experimental realization of Coulombordered ‘crystalline’ ion beams in the low-energy RF-quadrupole storage ring PAul Laser CooLing Acceleration System (Munich). Moreover, systematic studies revealed severe constraints on the cooling scheme and the storage ring lattice for the attainment and maintenance of the crystallin...

We propose a system that reduces laser display speckles by vibrating the light pipe. A small displacement of the light pipe appears to allow the total reflection of the laser, thereby resulting in a homogenized speckle field that changes with time. In this case, the speckle interference generated by the pattern projected by the laser through the light pipe destroys the spatial homogenization of...