| Popis: |
The slab laser is a promising architecture to achieve high beam quality and high power. By propagating the laser beams in zigzag geometries, the temperature gradient in the gain medium can be well averaged, and the beam quality in this direction can be excellent. However, the temperature gradient in the non-zigzag direction is not compensated, resulting in aberrations in this direction which lead to poorer beam quality. Among the overall aberrations, the main contributors are two low-order aberrations: astigmatism and defocus. These aberrations will magnify beam divergence angle and degrade beam quality. If the beam divergence angles in both directions are almost zero, the astigmatism and defocus are well corrected. Besides, the output beams of slab lasers are generally in a rectangular aperture with high aspect ratio (normally 1:10), which need to be reshaped into square in many applications. In this paper, a new method is proposed to correct low-order aberrations and reshape the beams of slab lasers. Three lenses are adapted, one is a spherical lens and the others are cylindrical lenses. These lenses work as a beam shaping system, which converts the beam from rectangular into square and the low-order aberrations are compensated simultaneously. Two wavefront sensors are used to detect input and output beam parameters. The initial size of the beam is 4mm×20mm, and peak to valley (PV) value of the wavefront is several tens of microns. Simulation results show that after correction, the dimension becomes 40mm×40mm, and peak to valley (PV) value of the wavefront is less than 1microns. |
