Abstract
Beam quality and output power of high-power solid state lasers are frequently limited by aberrations of the active medium. If a resonator is set up such that it forces the laser to operate in the TEM00 fundamental transverse mode, aberrations cause high diffraction losses. This in turn leads to a strong reduction of the output power. High-power lasers have such a high thermal load and corresponding high aberrations that the diffraction losses usually prevent efficient lasing of a fundamental-mode resonator. The common approach is then to use a resonator with a large Fresnel number that can sustain higher-order Gauss-Hermite or Gauss-Laguerre modes, because even in the presence of strong aberrations these resonators have eigenmodes with low diffraction losses. However, since the beam quality is no longer diffraction-limited this is not a desirable solution. Phase conjugation based on stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) has been used to compensate for the aberrations of laser amplifiers but the nonlinear SBS requires high peak power for a reasonably high reflectivity of the of the phase-conjugating mirror.
© 2003 Optical Society of America
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