Self-Healing Properties of Fibre Laser Petal-like Beams

Fibre lasers (FLs) are mainstream industrial laser sources for applications in material processing. The next industrial digital manufacturing era requires beam shaping capabilities to provide efficacy, energy efficiency, and new functionalities for advanced manufacturing [1] . Recently, we presented a robust kW-class FL with an adjustable beam profile offering improved material processing capability, as compared with standard Gaussian beams [2] . The output beam can be configured from a diffraction-limited Gaussian profile into higher M 2 petal-like shaped beams. Petal beams (PBs) are known as linearly polarized (LP mn ) modes supported by optical fibres [3] . A remarkable property of partially blocked petal beams is that they self-heal or self-reconstruct in the far field, after a certain propagation distance [4] . Beam self-healing is an exciting research topic and different approaches have been proposed to understand it [4] , [5] .