Abstract

We report on a series of experiments for anamorphic beam shaping of totally incoherent light beams. In all these experiments the goal is to improve the beam quality (or brightness) in one spatial direction on the expense of a reduced beam quality in the orthogonal direction (preserving the two dimensional beam brightness). The necessary coupling between the two orthogonal axes is performed with anamorphic optics. In the first configuration simple continuous optical elements such as a cylindrical lens at 45° to both axes was used. For more general transformations an array of micro Porro-prisms [1] or a properly designed retro-reflector array [2] were used. Finally, tapered reflecting light pipes were shown to yield the similar anamorphic transformations at the adiabatic limit.

© 2000 IEEE