Long-range propagation of annular beam for lidar application

Long-range propagation characteristics of an annular beam were examined from the viewpoint of lidar application. The annular beam permits to use a reflecting telescope for transmission and improves the transmission efficiency because it can pass through the telescope without the obstruction of the telescope’s secondary mirror. As the annular beam can enlarge up to the telescope diameter, it can be eye-safe and its divergence is also reduced.The annular beam generated by a couple of Axicon prisms; conical prisms, transforms its beam shape into the central peak narrow beam; nearly non-diffractive beam, through the far-field propagation. We evaluated how the central peak intensity and its width of the transformed beam change in long-range of 3–100 km. The difficulty of the optical arraignment and the requirement of the beam quality to obtain the enough performance of the beam shape transformation were also examined theoretically and experimentally for the lidar application. The stability of the transformed beam was also confirmed in the atmospheric fluctuation.