Xu Bing, a researcher at the Institute of Optoelectronic Technology, Institute of Optoelectronic Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has long been committed to the research of solid-slab laser pointer beam purification based on adaptive optics.
Solid-state lasers have many advantages such as small size, light weight, long life, high efficiency, etc., and are widely used in industrial, medical, scientific research and other fields. Conventional round bar lasers have severe thermally induced birefringence effects and thermal lensing effects under high power pumping, making it difficult to achieve both high average power and high beam quality.
In order to solve this problem, Martin et al. proposed the concept of slab laser in 1969, which significantly improved the heat dissipation performance, but the thermal effect of the gain medium still caused the wavefront distortion of the beam and reduced the beam quality. How to achieve high average power and high beam quality at the same time is always a major problem in the development of solid slat laser pointer.
Due to the special structure and working mode of the solid slab laser, compared with the conventional adaptive optics system, the adaptive optical system of the solid slab laser needs to solve the large amplitude-to-width ratio beam, the low-order aberration pre-compensation, and the wavefront. Specific problems such as slope local anomaly processing and high flexibility wavefront processing.
Xu Bing team broke through the key technologies such as low-order aberration compensator, weighted optimization wavefront restoration method and general wavefront processor to achieve excellent beam quality of 1.64 times diffraction limit. Based on the above technology, more than 20 sets of adaptive optics systems have been developed, which have served the solid slab laser pointer system developed by many domestic units, and have achieved good results, ensuring the beam quality of the above laser system. Related papers have been published in the recent "Photoelectric Engineering".