Laser-induced damage threshold is an important parameter to evaluate the performance of the optical components in high power laser systems. An automated test system is presented to measure multiwavelength laser-induced damage threshold. The presented system can be able to operate the 1-on-1 and R-on-1 methodologies at 1064nm, 532nm, and 355nm. Some solutions are presented to improve the measurement efficiency and the reliability. Experimental results are also provided to confirm the capabilities of the proposed test system.
The damage morphology information is crucially important for optical components to analysis laser-induced damage resistance. Because of complex configurations, some high-precision and high-resolution techniques have limitations to detect in-line damage sites. Thus, a modified lateral shearing interferometer is proposed to obtain three- dimensional damage morphology information. In the presented method, the original beam passing through damage sites is magnified by a microscope system, and separated by a parallel plate into two sub-beams. In the overlap region of the sub-beams, the interference pattern can be used to extract the damage morphology information. Systematic errors are also eliminated from obtained interferograms before and after pulse laser irradiation, respectively. Experimental results are presented to confirm the feasibility of the proposed lateral shearing interferometer for in-line damage morphology measurement.
This work presents the influence of polarization orientation on bulk damage performance of type I doubler KDP crystals under different wavelengths pulses exposure. Pinpoints densities (PPD) and the size distribution of pinpoints are extracted through light scattering pictures. The obtained results strongly indicate that the measured PPD as a function of the fluence are both wavelength and polarization orientation related, while neither fluence nor polarization orientation affect the size distribution of pinpoints. We also find that the bulk damage characteristics can divide into three sorts with respect to the wavelength, suggesting the existence of different species of precursors and different mechanisms responsible for bulk damage initiation in SHG KDP crystals.
High-power laser plays an important role in many fields, such as directed energy weapon, optoelectronic contermeasures, inertial confinement fusion, industrial processing and scientific research. The uniform nearfield and wavefront are the important part of the beam quality for high power lasers, which is conducive to maintaining the high spatial beam quality in propagation. We demonstrate experimentally that the spatial intensity and wavefront distribution at the output is well compensated in the complex high-power solid-state laser system by using the small-aperture spatial light modulator (SLM) and deformable mirror (DM) in the front stage. The experimental setup is a hundred-Joule-level Nd:glass laser system operating at three wavelengths at 1053 nm (1ω), 527 nm (2ω) and 351 nm (3ω) with 3 ns pulse duration with the final output beam aperture of 60 mm. While the clear arperture of the electrically addressable SLM is less than 20 mm and the effective diameter of the 52-actuators DM is about 15 mm. In the beam shaping system, the key point is that the two front-stage beam shaping devices needs to precompensate the gain nonuniform and wavefront distortion of the laser system. The details of the iterative algorithm for improving the beam quality are presented. Experimental results show that output nearfield and wavefont are both nearly flat-topped with the nearfield modulation of 1.26:1 and wavefront peak-to-valley value of 0.29 λ at 1053nm after beam shaping.
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