Decentered elliptical Hermite-Gaussian beam

A new kind of laser beam called the decentered elliptical Hermite-Gaussian beam (DEHGB) is defined by use of a tensor method. The propagation formula of the DEHGB passing through a nonsymmetrical paraxial optical system is derived through vector integration. The derived formula can be easily reduced to the propagation formula of an aligned elliptical Hermite-Gaussian beam and that of a decentered elliptical Gaussian beam under certain conditions. By use of this formula, the propagation characteristics of the DEHGB through free space are presented graphically. As application examples, we construct a generalized laser array using the DEHGB as the fundamental mode. We also obtain the decentered elliptical flattened Gaussian beam by expressing it as superposition of a series of DEHGBs by using polynomial expansion. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.