Energy Scaling of SBS Phase Conjugate Mirrors to 4J

Abstract

Phase conjugation (PC) via stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is widely used, convenient technique for improving the performance of many pulsed lasers. For laser output energies ~1J, satisfactory performance can generally be achieved using a simple SBS phase-conjugate mirror (PCM) in which the beam to be conjugated is simply focussed into a bulk SBS medium. Exploitating PC in lasers producing output energies >10J requires a PCM that produces good conjugation fidelity at energies >1J.