Controllable beam shaping of coherent and incoherent beams by a laser amplifier

We propose the technique for a controllable manipulation of the transverse intensity distribution of an output beam by the temporal adjustment of a transverse gain profile in a laser amplifier. It was created by an independent manipulation of the output powers of each of the two pump diodes. The output beam of the laser amplifier is able to vary both the output power and the transverse intensity distribution. Additionally, it was shown experimentally that this technique is valid for the case of incoherent laser beam shaping. (letter)