In arts, as well as iii entertainment, visual effects are often used to gain the attention of people A striking effect can be t he lilairi reason for the success of an artist's or an entertainment product. Modern optical technologies are very ml erestilig fr sonic artists to lughiliglit their art objects by some nice optical effect.In our paper we report about an unusual hut attractive project between the Berliii Inst it lit of ( )ptlcs and tin Gernian artist Leonore Zimrnermann. The idea of the project was to combine a laser-optical effect with an art print. In this context we have designed a diode laser effect illuminator which can be used to display an image of a lion associated with an art print of Leonore Zimmerniann. The optical key component of this illuminator is a diffractive element the transmission function of which has been computed to obtain the desired object image by exploitat iou of the diffraction effect. The diode laser effect illuminator is a simple device which can be used to display almost arhit rarv images or short image sequences. In combination with printing arts, we hope, it will surprise and fascinate JO )j)le by its nice effects. 126 SPIE Vol. 3285 • 0277-786X198/$1OOO

No abstract

No abstract

The use of metal gratings inside laser resonators is limited to medium power because of a low damage threshold. High-re¯ectivity (HR) dielectric layer systems commonly used as laser mirrors o er a damage threshold signi®cantly above that of metals. A di raction grating on top of a HR system combines high re¯ectivity with spectral properties. We describe a special HR grating used in a Littrow mounting as a wavelength selective resonator mirror in a 1.44 mm neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet laser. The necessary restrictions lead to conditions with four transmission orders, making it more di cult to reach high e ciency, than found by Perry and co-workers. The design of the binary di raction grating on a dielectric layer system is based on a new ®nite-element method. Also for the more di cult con®guration, a di raction e ciency of nearly 100% is theoretically possible. Because of the new conditions in contrast with these in the work of Perry and co-workers, other materials have to be used. For two di erent material combinations, HR gratings are fabricated. The limiting factors in realizing 100% e ciency, are the material parameters and fabrication tolerances. First examples of gratings o er fairly good agreement with the theoretical values.