Adaptive slab laser beam quality improvement using a weighted least-squares reconstruction algorithm.

Abstract

Adaptive optics is an important technology for improving beam quality in solid-state slab lasers. However, there are uncorrectable aberrations in partial areas of the beam. In the criterion of the conventional least-squares reconstruction method, it makes the zones with small aberrations nonsensitive and hinders this zone from being further corrected. In this paper, a weighted least-squares reconstruction method is proposed to improve the relative sensitivity of zones with small aberrations and to further improve beam quality. Relatively small weights are applied to the zones with large residual aberrations. Comparisons of results show that peak intensity in the far field improved from 1242 analog digital units (ADU) to 2248 ADU, and beam quality β improved from 2.5 to 2.0. This indicates the weighted least-squares method has better performance than the least-squares reconstruction method when there are large zonal uncorrectable aberrations in the slab laser system.