Wavefront correction of Ti: sapphire terawatt laser with varying precision of phase conjugation between deformable mirror and wavefront sensor

Abstract

The phase conjugation between the deformable mirror and the wavefront sensor in the aberration correction of a terawatt Ti:sapphire laser is studied experimentally and theoretically in this paper. At varying values of phase-conjugation precision, we focus the corresponding beams into spots of the same size of 5.1 μm × 5.3 μm with a f/4 parabola in the 32 TW/36 fs Ti:sapphire laser system. The results show that the precision of conjugation can induce an intensity modulation but does not significantly affect the wavefront correction.

Spatial chirp in Ti:sapphire multipass amplifier

“…During the past several decades, immense progress has been made in the research of high-power Ti:sapphire chirped pulse amplification (CPA) laser system. [1][2][3][4] The ultrahigh peak power laser can produce a focused intensity of 10 21 -10 22 W/cm 2 class, [5,6] which is thought to be suitable for high-field physics, such as particle acceleration, filamentation, x-ray generation, and the study of plasma physics. [7][8][9][10][11][12] At present, the development of femtosecond high power laser systems with power levels of 10 PW or even 100 PW is being pursued.…”

Comparison between iterative wavefront control algorithm and direct gradient wavefront control algorithm for adaptive optics system

“…Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique that was conceived to compensate in real time for the phase perturbations introduced by atmospheric turbulence. [1,2] At present, AO systems have been used in many fields, such as improving laser beam quality, [3][4][5][6][7][8] correcting the errors in astro-observation brought by atmospheric disturbances, [9][10][11][12] researching on ocular aberration, etc. The standard and most used wavefront control algorithm for AO system is a direct gradient wavefront control algorithm, which is based on a matrix-vector multiplication of the relational matrix from deformable mirror (DM) to Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) and the slope vector measured by WFS.…”