Kinoform phase plates for focal plane irradiance profile control.

A versatile, rapidly convergent, iterative algorithm is presented for the construction of kinoform phase plates for tailoring the far-field intensity distribution of laser beams. The method consists of repeated Fourier transforming between the near-field and the far-field planes with constraints imposed in each plane. For application to inertial confinement fusion, the converged far-field pattern contains more than 95% of the incident energy inside a desired region and is relatively insensitive to beam aberrations.