Adaptive Optics for High-Power Laser Beam Control

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive optical closed loop system with a bimorph mirror as a wavefront corrector and a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor to compensate for the aberrations of high power lasers. An adaptive system can correct for the low-order aberrations in the real-time – the frequency of corrected aberrations is less then 25 (30) Hz. The amplitude of such aberrations – about 7 microns. These parameters are mostly determined by the utilized Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor. Number of corrected aberrations – up to 30th Zernike polynomial (excluding tip-tilt).We are presenting the results of the use of our adaptive system in several TW laser systems such as ATLAS, LULI and Beijing Institute of Physics.