Conventional phase measuring deflectometry (PMD) takes up a large measurement space and is not suitable for compact online measurement, as the liquid crystal display (LCD) has to be placed in parallel with the mirror under test. In this paper, a compact online phase measuring deflectometry (COPMD) with the LCD screen set perpendicular to the mirror under test is presented for surface shape distortion real-time measurement. The configuration of the COPMD in an enclosed laser cavity is proposed, and the principle of the method is theoretically derived by using the vector-form reflection law. Based on the analysis model, the fringe modulation regulation of the LCD is revealed, and the measurement errors caused by misalignments of the components are illustrated. The validity and flexibility of the COPMD method are verified in the experiment by using a single-actuator deformable mirror as the mirror under test and the PMD method as the comparison. The proposed COPMD method remarkably expands the application range of the conventional PMD method, as it could make efficient use of compact space and is applicable for real-time measurement in enclosed laser facilities and assembled laser systems.

Deformable mirrors (DMs) are widely used in high-power laser systems to improve the output beam quality. However, under high-power laser irradiation, the heat accumulates on the DM mirror surface and results in high-power laser induced distortions (LID), which will degrade the wavefront correction performance of the DM. In order to suppress the negative impact of the LID on the DM’s performance, we introduce the dual magnetic connection DM (DDM), in which the mirror and the base are connected by two-layer magnets. Configuration of the DDM is presented. The simulation is established to analyze the LID characteristics as well as the wavefront correction performance of the DDM. An experiment is established to investigate the LID of the DDM in practical conditions. Simulation and experiment results indicate that under high-power laser irradiation, the DDM could effectively suppress the LID and maintain good wavefront correction capability.

As an essential part of optical telescope, the secondary mirror is subject to the influence of ambient temperature, which leads to temperature-induced distortion on the surface shape. A hybrid ball-hinged secondary mirror assembly (HSMA) is proposed to achieve thermal adaptation over a wide range of temperature. Simulation investigation on the temperature-induced surface shape distortion of the HSMA were carried out by using the finite element model. Simulation results show that the change of secondary mirror surface distortions over a wide range of temperature are minimal and negligible. For the wide ambient temperature range from -30°C to 70°C, the PV and RMS values of the maximum residual distortions can reach as small as 16.31 nm and 3.005 nm, respectively. Furthermore, the influence of gravity-induced distortion on the surface shape is also carried out. Both simulation and experiment results show that the HSMA is able to maintain high-precision surface shape of the secondary mirror over a wide range of temperature and at different attitudes from 0 to 90∘.

This paper proposes a single-shot high robustness wavefront sensing method based on deep-learning for wavefront distortion measurement in high power lasers. This method could achieve fast and robust wavefront retrieval by using a single-shot near-field profile image and trained network. The deep-learning network uses fully-skip cross connections to extract and integrate multi-scale feature maps from various layers and stages, which improves the wavefront retrieval speed and enhances the robustness of the method. The numerical simulation proves that the method could directly predict the wavefront distortion of high power lasers with high accuracy. The experiment demonstrates the residual RMS between the method and a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is less than 0.01 µm. The simulational and experimental results show that the method could accurately predict the incident wavefront distortion in high power lasers, exhibiting high speed and good robustness in wavefront retrieval.

Helicity and topological charge are two important characteristic parameters for vortex beam applications, including optical communications, optical manipulation and material processing, etc. In this work, a helicity and topological charge tunable vortex laser based on a folded resonant cavity is presented. In the resonant cavity, a Z-shaped structure is adopted and two deformable mirrors (DMs) are cascaded into the cavity as intro-cavity modulation elements. By applying different voltage combinations to the DMs, the Hermite-Gaussian (HG) beam with different indices and distribution orientations θ could be generated from the Z-shaped folded-cavity resonator. An extra-cavity astigmatic mode converter is adopted to convert the generated HG beam to the corresponding vortex beam with tunable helicity and topological charge, and the simulation results verified the feasibility of the presented vortex laser. In the experiment, the HGm,0θ beam (m = 1 to 10 and θ = −90 ° to 90 °]) and the vortex beam (topological charge l from ±1 to ±10 and left/right helicity) were flexibly achieved by simply adjusting the driving voltage combinations of the intra-cavity cascaded DMs.