The present invention is directed to guided wave systems, beam transport and
waveguide techniques. The invention may comprise passive or active, hollow and
dielectric core self-imaging mode wave guide systems, beam amplifiers (10, 40),
laser resonators (70), beam transports, and waveguides. Embodiments may
include rectangular cross-section waveguides, and preferably maintaining spatial
profile of an input beam, such as a Gaussian beam, through the self-imaging period
of the waveguide while unique new capabilities to mitigate non-linear distortions
that corrupt spatial, spectral and temporal coherence and polarization. Additional
aspects may include, for example, transport, amplification, phase/frequency control
or modulation, deflection, conversion, synthetic aperture, distributed aperture,
beam forming, beam steering, beam combining, power sampling, power combining and
power splitting, among other features. Some embodiments may provide a self-imaging,
multimode, waveguide (10) and self-imaging guided wave systems and beam
transport. Embodiments of the present invention may further provide a method of
self-imaging, multimode beam transport and other self-imaging wave guidance techniques.
