Despeckling fly's eye homogenizer for single mode laser diodes.

A novel fly's eye homogenizer for single mode laser diodes is presented. This technology overcomes the speckle problem that has been unavoidable for fly's eye homogenizers used with coherent light sources such as single mode laser diodes. Temporal and spatial coherence are reduced simultaneously by introducing short pulse driving of the injection current and a staircase element. Speckle has been dramatically reduced to 5% from 87% compared to a conventional system and a uniform laser line illumination was obtained by the proposed fly's eye homogenizer with a single mode UV-blue laser diode for the first time. A new spatial coherence function was mathematically formulated to model the proposed system and was applied to a partially coherent intensity formula that was newly developed in this study from Wolf's theory to account for the results.