To achieve high output power and/or high efficiencies, laser systems are often designed to operate with either high-order or multiorder transverse modes. This comes at the expense of beam quality. Herein, a technique for converting the two lobes of a higher-order (Hermite-Gaussian TEM_(10)) beam into two TEM_(00) beams is discussed. It is shown that nearly 94percent of the power in a single lobe of the TEM_(10) beam spatially overlaps an appropriately chosen TEM_(00) beam. Beam quality (defined by the M~(2) beam quality factor) is increased by separating the two TEM_(10) lobes with an edge aperture. A single-mode optical fiber can be used as a spatial filter to eliminate residual higher-order mode content. This study suggests that more than 90percent of the power in a TEM_(10) beam can be converted into two separate TEM_(00) beams.
展开▼
