Propagation of a flattened Gaussian beam through multi-apertured optical ABCD systems

By expanding the hard-aperture function into a finite sum of complex Gaussian functions, the recurrence propagation formula of a flattened Gaussian beam through multi-apertured optical ABCD systems is derived, and the propagation of a Gaussian beam is regarded as a special case in our theoretical model. The extension to the three-dimensional case is described. Numerical examples of the beam propagation through a multiple aperture-lens system and an aperture-spatial filter are given and compared with those by the straightforward numerical integration of the Collins formula. It is shown that our analytical results give a good trade-off between the computational time and accuracy, and provide a useful tool for simulating the beam propagation through complicated optical systems including multiple apertures and spatial filters. Finally, a comparison with the previous work is made and the main results obtained in this paper are summarized.