Beam quality active control of a slab MOPA solid state laser with combined deformable mirrors

Abstract

A novel phase aberration correcting method based on combined deformable mirrors (DMs) in a slab MOPA (master oscillator and power amplifier) solid state laser system is proposed and validated experimentally. The adaptive optics(AO) system with combined deformable mirrors composed of a one-dimension (1D) DM with 11 actuators and a two-dimension (2D) DM with 67 valid actuators, has been designed to correct the phase aberrations, which doesn’t need the high voltage drivers and has an excellent correcting efficiency of the high order phase aberrations. The experimental results show that the wave front of the slab laser beam is compensated well and the residual wave front is less than 0.08 λ rms. The beam quality of the slab laser in the far field is improved to1.67x DL.