Digitally controlled multimode laser for high-resolution and robust beam shaping

Laser beams can be shaped by controlling either the intensity or phase or coherence distribution separately. With typical laser configurations, the intensity and phase controls are relatively slow and cannot yield high-resolution arbitrarily shaped beams and the coherence control suffers from high power loss. By resorting to a degenerate cavity laser that incorporates an intra-cavity digital spatial light modulator and an intra-cavity spatial Fourier filter, it is possible to exploit a very large number (about 100,000) of independent lasing spatial modes in order to control the properties of the laser output. We have adapted this configuration to develop a novel, rapid and efficient method to generate highresolution laser beams with arbitrary intensity, phase and coherence distributions.