A laser amplification device includes a laser oscillator that includes a first laser active medium including a mixed gas containing carbon dioxide gas and emits pulsed laser light with the full width at half maximum of between 15 ns to 200 ns, and a laser amplifier that includes a second laser active medium including a mixed gas containing carbon dioxide gas through which the pulsed laser light emitted from the laser oscillator passes to be shortened to pulsed laser light with the full width at half maximum of between 5 ns and 30 ns to be output.

A beam shaping system including an all-optical liquid crystal beam shaper, the beam shaper including a photoswitchable alignment material including at least one of a PESI-F, SPMA:MMA 1:5, SPMA:MMA 1:9, ora SOMA:SOMA-p:MMA 1:1:6 material, at least some of the liquid crystals of the beam shaper including at least one of a phenylcyclohexane, cyclo-cyclohexane, or a perfluorinated material.

An apparatus for spectral broadening of laser pulses includes a main body, a plurality of mirror elements fastened to the main body, each having a mirror surface formed thereon and configured to reflect the laser pulses the plurality of mirror elements being fastened to a main body, and at least one nonlinear optical medium for the passage of the laser pulses for the generation of a nonlinear phase (Φ.sub.NL) by self-phase modulation. The at least one nonlinear optical medium may be a sheet-like and disk-shaped solid-state optical medium and/or a gaseous optical medium.

Apparatus and methods for altering one or more spectral, spatial, or temporal characteristics of a light-emitting device are disclosed. Generally, such apparatus may include a volume Bragg grating (VBG) element that receives input light generated by a light-emitting device, conditions one or more characteristics of the input light, and causes the light-emitting device to generate light having the one or more characteristics of the conditioned light.

According to one aspect, the invention concerns a device for transporting and controlling light pulses for lensless endo-microscopic imaging and comprises: a bundle of N monomode optical fibers (F.sub.1) arranged in a given pattern, each monomode optical fiber being characterized by a relative group delay value (Ax) defined relative to the travel time of a pulse propagating in a reference monomode optical fiber (F.sub.0) of the bundle of fibers (40), an optical device for controlling group velocity (50) comprising a given number M of waveplates (P.sub.j) characterized by a given delay (8t.sub.j); a first spatial light modulator (51) suitable for forming from an incident light beam a number N of elementary light beams (B.sub.i) each of which is intended to enter into one of said optical fibers, each elementary beam being intended to pass into a given waveplate such that the sum of the delay introduced by said waveplate and the relative group delay of the optical fiber intended to receive said elementary light beam is minimal in absolute value; a second spatial light modulator (52) suitable for deviating each of the N elementary light beams such that each elementary light beam penetrates into the corresponding optical fiber perpendicularly to the entrance face of the optical fiber.

The laser system may include a delay circuit unit, first and second trigger-correction units, and a clock generator. The delay circuit unit may receive a trigger signal, output a first delay signal obtained by delaying the trigger signal by a first delay time, and output a second delay signal obtained by delaying the trigger signal by a second delay time. The first trigger-correction unit may receive the first delay signal and output a first switch signal obtained by delaying the first delay signal by a first correction time. The second trigger-correction unit may receive the second delay signal and output a second switch signal obtained by delaying the second delay signal by a second correction time. The clock generator may generate a clock signal that is common to the delay circuit unit and the first and second trigger-correction units.

Provided is a line beam forming device that can divide a laser beam into beam segments in a first direction (y-axis) perpendicular to the traveling direction (z-axis) of the laser beam, and arrange and emit the beam segments with regular intervals in a second direction (x-axis) perpendicular to the traveling direction of the laser beam, using a single mirror set composed of a plurality of mirrors. The line beam forming device of the present invention can be used for an excimer laser which is a multimode laser beam generator with high beam divergence, a high-power DPSS laser, or a laser diode, can obtain high-density energy by condensing beams, can obtain a beam profile having uniform intensity in both of a long axis and a short axis, and can combine a plurality of laser beams without being influenced by the properties of an incident beam.

A laser irradiation method of irradiating, with a pulse laser beam, an irradiation object in which an impurity source film is formed on a semiconductor substrate includes: reading fluence per pulse of the pulse laser beam with which a rectangular irradiation region set on the irradiation object is irradiated and the number of irradiation pulses the irradiation region is irradiated, the fluence being equal to or larger than a threshold at or beyond which ablation potentially occurs to the impurity source film when the irradiation object is irradiated with pulses of the pulse laser beam in the irradiation pulse number and smaller than a threshold at or beyond which damage potentially occurs to the surface of the semiconductor substrate; calculating a scanning speed Vdx; and moving the irradiation object at the scanning speed Vdx relative to the irradiation region while irradiating the irradiation region with the pulse laser beam at the repetition frequency f.

The invention relates to a device (10) for amplifying a laser pulse which comprises a divider section (14) for dividing the laser pulse into multiple sub pulses (43) and for introducing a time delay between the sub pulses (43), a compressor section (15) for compressing the temporally divided sub pulses (43) and a combiner section (17) for combining the compressed sub pulses (44) to one compressed laser pulse (45).

An apparatus (10) for increasing a pulse length of a pulsed radiation beam, the apparatus comprising: a beam splitter (16) configured to split an input radiation beam (18) into a first beam (24) and a second beam (22); an optical arrangement (12, 14), wherein the beam splitter and the optical arrangement are configured such that at least a portion of the first beam is recombined with the second beam into a modified beam after an optical delay of the first beam caused by the optical arrangement; and at least one optical element (30) in an optical path of the first beam, the at least one optical element configured such that the phase of different parts of a wavefront of the first beam is varied to reduce coherence between the first beam and the second beam.