Analysis of Maladjustment Sensitivity and Calibration Method for a Positive-Branch Confocal Unstable Resonator

Abstract

The effect of intracavity aberration perturbation on output mode structure properties of unstable laser resonator is been experimentally researched using Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor on the basis of numerical analysis. Results show that intracavity tilt aberration notablely affects outcoupled intensity distribution, but only a small intracavity tilt perturbation will not obviously augment the high-order aberrations of beam phase properties. The tilt aberration, coma aberration and astigmatism will all be brought, and also tilt aberration is the main component when intracavity mirrors have a vertical movement along the direction of optic axis. When adaptive optical elements such as deformable mirrors are adopted for intracavity aberration correction, the correction for tilt aberration should be considered firstly.