Abstract

Phase plates are used in holography, laser fusion, and laser microscopy to produce a well-defined beam profile, and they are key to improving overall system performance.¹ However, it is also known that static phase plates cannot smooth unwanted highly modulated speckle because of the coherence of a laser beam. For smoothing the speckle by using partially coherent light, so-called smoothing by spectral dispersion² or induced spatial incoherence has been proposed.³ For slow or static applications there is a simple way to smooth the speckle by moving a random phase plate.⁴

© 1995 Optical Society of America