Numerical investigation of the influence of wavefront distortion on the laser near-field characteristics

Abstract

The effect of the initial phase distortion of the laser on near-field transmission characteristics in free space is investigated both numerically and theoretically. It is demonstrated and proposed that the near-field modulation and fluence contrast of the output laser beam are changing with the increase of both spatial low- and high-frequency wavefront distortion. The simulation results show that in order to ensure the beam quality in propagation, the Fresnel number should be controlled not <50 generally and the wavefront distortion should also be minimized by controlling both low- and high-frequency phase coefficient not larger than 0.6.

Improving the performance of a laser-driven flyer with a diffractive optical element of high wavefront distortion tolerance

“…Here, we discuss the wavefront distortion tolerance of our designed DOE. We used a wavefront distortion model [31][32][33][34] to construct different distortion phases for the input beam in order to simulate the possible wavefront distortion during actual use. In the simulation, five types of wavefront distortion ranges are constructed, including 0 ∼ λ/4, 0 ∼ λ/2, 0 ∼ λ, 0 ∼ 2λ, 0 ∼ 3λ.…”