Design concept for diffractive elements shaping partially coherent laser beams

A new two-step design algorithm for the calculation of a diffractive phase element (DPE) for use with partially coherent laser beams is presented. The optical reconstruction of the DPE is modeled by the convolution of a coherent diffraction pattern and the far-field intensity distribution of a partially coherent laser beam. Numerical deconvolution is applied to derive a suitable amplitude pattern as signal input to a standard iterative Fourier transform algorithm (IFTA). Theory and numerical results are presented. Compared with a single-step IFTA design, this new approach yields nearly equal diffraction efficiencies and a relative improvement of 15% in signal reconstruction error.