LAUSR

Abstract Holographic laser beam shaping using a spatial light modulator can provide flexible adaptation of the intensity profile. However, speckle noise exists in the shaped beams, which reduces the beam quality seriously. In this paper, a new method is proposed to implement noise reduced flat-top beam shaping. The Gerchberg–Saxton (GS) algorithm with special spherical initial phase profile is adopted to calculate the phase-only hologram. When the spherical phase distribution is properly selected, the speckle free flat-top beam with high diffraction efficiency and low root-mean-square error can be obtained. Both simulations and experiments are performed to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The comparison with the conventional GS algorithm using a random initial phase distribution is also carried out.