The invention of lasers 60 years ago is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern optics. Throughout the years, lasers have enabled major scientific and technological advancements, and have been exploited in numerous applications due to their advantages such as high brightness and high coherence. However, the high spatial coherence of laser illumination is not always desirable, as it can cause adverse artifacts such as speckle noise in imaging applications. To reduce the spatial coherence of a laser, novel cavity geometries and alternative feedback mechanisms have been developed. By tailoring the spatial and spectral properties of cavity resonances, the number of lasing modes, the emission profiles and the coherence properties can be controlled. This technical review presents an overview of such unconventional, complex lasers, with a focus on their spatial coherence properties. Laser coherence control not only provides an efficient means for eliminating coherent artifacts, but also enables new applications.

Topological defects have been observed and studied in a wide range of systems, such as cosmology, spin systems, cold atoms, and optics, as they are quenched across a phase transition into an ordered state. These defects limit the coherence of the system and its ability to approach a fully ordered state, so revealing their origin and control is becoming an increasingly important field of research. We observe dissipative topological defects in a one-dimensional ring of phased-locked lasers, and show how their formation is related to the Kibble-Zurek mechanism and is governed in a universal manner by two competing time scales. The ratio between these two time scales depends on the system parameters, and thus offers the possibility of enabling the system to dissipate to a fully ordered, defect-free state that can be exploited for solving hard computational problems in various fields.

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An optical system solves the phase retrieval problem by exploiting the natural mode competition inside a degenerate laser cavity.

Incorporation of a metasurface that involves spin-orbit interaction phenomenon into a laser cavity provides a route to the generation of spin-controlled intracavity modes with different topologies. By utilizing the geometric phase, Pancharatnam-Berry phase, we found a spin-enabled self-consistent cavity solution of a Nd:YAG laser with a silicon-based metasurface. Using this solution we generated a laser mode possessing spin-controlled orbital-angular momentum. Moreover, an experimental demonstration of a vectorial vortex is achieved by the coherent superposition of modes with opposite spin and orbital angular momenta. We experimentally achieved a high mode purity of ∼95% due to laser mode competition and purification. The photonic spin-orbit interaction mechanism within a laser-cavity can be implemented with multifunctional sharedaperture nanoantenna arrays to achieve multiple intracavity topologies.