Abstract

Design and operation of a practical, accurate alignment diagnostic system is important for the grating tiling technology, which is supposed to be applied in a chirped-pulse amplification system to increase the output power. A diagnostic method is proposed and demonstrated for grating tiling. Provided that the wavelength and incident angle of the diagnostic beam are properly set, the far-field of the main laser beam and that of the diagnostic beam can vary in the same way with the tiling errors between the sub-aperture gratings. Therefore, rotational and translational errors can be controlled and compensated according to the far-field of the diagnostic beam. The real-time monitoring and alignment can be achieved without disturbing the main beam.

© 2008 Chinese Optics Letters

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