Effect of Quartic Phase Optical Aberration on Laser Beam Quality

Abstract

Laser beam quality is related to the aberration effect. Quartic phase aberration, more commonly known as spherical aberration, can result from aberrated optical components such as beam expanding telescopes, focusing or collimating lenses, or other conventional optical elements; from thermal focusing or thermal blooming in high power laser windows, lenses, amplifier rods, optical isolators, and other absorbing media. In general any kind of quartic aberration will lead to increased far field beam spread, degraded laser beam focusability and increased values of the beam quality. Currently, a well established quality parameter for laser beams is the M2 factor. This paper presents a new mathematical set for the spherical aberration coefficient C4 of Gaussian beams. The main idea comes from the estimation of the laser beam quality factor M2 given by Siegman. We show that this coefficient concerns only the case of geometrical optics.