Cheng-Huan CHEN, Chien-Chuan CHEN, and Wei-Chien LIANG¹

Power Mechanical Engineering Department, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Section 2, Kuang-Fu Road, Hsinchu 30013, Taiwan, R.O.C.
¹Electronic Engineering Department, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43, Section 4, Keelong Road, Taipei 106, Taiwan, R.O.C.

(Received January 31, 2007; Accepted April 25, 2007)

A light pipe based laser beam shaper is proposed as a low loss approach to transfer a Gaussian laser beam into a long line beam with uniform distribution along the line direction for the applications of illumination or material processing. A telecentric relay optics has been used for solving the radiometric issues in the wide angle optics. In addition, the length of the light pipe is used as a parameter for manipulating irradiance distribution at the outlet to compensate for the non-uniformity resulting from the partial reflection at the optical interface in the relay optics, so as to achieve a highly uniform line beam at the target plane. The proposed scheme provides an economical and versatile solution for the wide angle beam shaping problem.

Key words: laser beam shaping, light pipe