In order to improve the damage threshold and enlarge the aperture of a laser beam shaper, photolithographic patterning technology is adopted to design a new type of liquid crystal binary mask. The inherent conductive metal layer of commercial liquid crystal electro-optical spatial light modulators is replaced by azobenzene-based photoalignment layers patterned by noncontact photolithography. Using the azobenzene-based photoalignment layer, a liquid crystal binary mask for beam shaping is fabricated. In addition, the shaping ability, damage threshold, write/erase flexibility and stability of the liquid crystal binary mask are tested. Using a 1 Hz near-IR (1064 nm) laser, the multiple-shot nanosecond damage threshold of the liquid crystal mask is measured to be higher than $15~\text{J}/\text{cm}^{2}$. The damage threshold of the azobenzene-based photoalignment layer is higher than $50~\text{J}/\text{cm}^{2}$ under the same testing conditions.
In this paper, a holographic system to suppress the speckle noise is proposed. Two spatial light modulators (SLMs) are used in the system, one of which is used for beam shaping, and the other is used for reproducing the image. By calculating the effective viewing angle of the reconstructed image, the effective hologram and the effective region of the SLM are calculated accordingly. Then, the size of the diffractive optical element (DOE) is calculated accordingly. The dynamic DOEs and effective hologram are loaded on the effective regions of the two SLMs, respectively, while the wasted areas of the two SLMs are performed with zero-padded operations. When the laser passes through the first SLM, the light can be modulated by the effective DOEs. When the modulated beam illuminates the second SLM which is loaded with the effective hologram, the image is reconstructed with better quality and lower speckle noise. Moreover, the calculation time of the hologram is reduced. Experiments indicate the validity of the proposed system.
High damage threshold liquid crystal binary mask for laser beam shaping