ABSTRACT
A convenient method of three-dimensional ray tracing is suggested in the geometrical optical approximation, in which the laser ray propagation is completely based on the concept of optical trajectory tracing rather than depending upon the effective force and propagation time. This tracing has two obvious advantages that the direct application of Snell's law can be avoided when a ray crosses a different density zone and that to any desired accuracy it takes much less computation time than existing tracing. For Gaussian light beam propagation, in a spherically symmetric plasma atmosphere, the results emphasize that the deposition uniformity is strongly dependent not only on the wavelength of the laser but also on the temperature of the plasma.
