Adaptive laser resonators

Author

Wittrock, Ulrich ; Buske, Ivo ; Heuck, Hans-Martin

Author_Institution

Photonics Lab., Univ. of Appl. Sci. Muenster, Steinfurt, Germany

fYear

2003

fDate

6-6 June 2003

Abstract

Beam quality and output power of high-power solid state lasers were frequently limited by aberrations of the active medium. If a resonators were set up such that it forces the laser to operate in the TEM/sub 00/ fundamental transverse mode, aberrations cause high diffraction losses. This in turn leads to a strong reduction of the output power. In this paper, optical layout of master-oscillator-power-amplifier (MOPA) systems with adaptive aberration compensation was discussed. The genetic control algorithm was employed to control the deformable mirror and experimental results for the MOPA system was presented. For both systems commercial lamp-pumped Nd:YAG laser heads that can provide about 500 W of output power when used in a multimode resonator was used.

Keywords

aberrations; adaptive optics; genetic algorithms; laser beams; laser cavity resonators; laser modes; neodymium; optical losses; solid lasers; yttrium compounds; 500 W; TEM/sub 00/ fundamental transverse mode; YAG:Nd; YAl5O12:Nd; adaptive aberration compensation; adaptive laser resonators; commercial lamp-pumped Nd:YAG laser; diffraction losses; genetic control algorithm; high-power solid state lasers; laser beam quality; laser output power; master-oscillator-power-amplifier; multimode resonator; Adaptive optics; Adaptive systems; Control systems; Laser beams; Laser modes; Optical diffraction; Optical losses; Optical resonators; Power generation; Solid lasers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Lasers and Electro-Optics, 2003. CLEO '03. Conference on

Conference_Location

Baltimore, MD, USA

Print_ISBN

1-55752-748-2

Type

conf

Filename

1298623