Digital Degenerate Cavity Laser

In the past, we investigated degenerate cavity lasers (DCL) which allows manipulation of both near-field and far-field properties of the output beam. The DCL was comprised of a gain medium, two lenses in a 4f telescope configuration, an output coupler at one end and a back mirror at the other end. With the DCL we investigated topological defects in arrays of coupled lasers[1, simulation of classical spins arrays in a frustrated geometry[2, beam focusing after scattering media[3, and lasers with controllable coherence functions for speckles reduction[4. In these investigations, the DCL usually included metallic masks of holes and filters that had to be specifically designed and fabricated for each application.