Focusing light with a flame lens.

The lens is a well-understood optical component used for focusing light, but is almost exclusively made in the solid-state form and, thus, suffers from optical damage at high powers. Attempts to overcome this through the use of non-solid graded-index media for lensing, for example, heated gasses, have found limited application owing to their long focal lengths. Here we describe the first flame lens, which produces a sharp focus with very little stray light and has a fourfold increase in focal power per unit length over previous gas lenses. Such gas devices remain topical due to their inherent ability to deliver high-power laser beams: our flame lens has a 'damage' threshold that is several orders of magnitude higher than that of most conventional lenses and is immediately repaired after damage for reuse, and thus will be of use in focusing high-irradiance laser beams.