Design of a Refractive Beam Shaper to Generate a Circular Top-Hat

For applications like laser material processing, the laser beam must be shaped into certain distributions on the target plane. Typically, it is desired to obtain homogeneous distributions within an area, for example, a top-hat beam profile. With the user-friendly design tools in VirtualLab Fusion, a refractive beam shaper with an aspherical surface is designed for shaping a fundamental Gaussian beam into top-hat profile on the target plane. The performance of the beam shaping element is analyzed in terms of conversion efficiency, SNR, etc.