Self-compensation of thermal lensing in optics for high-brightness solid-state lasers

摘要

The applicability of modern high-brightness solid-state laser sources for material processing purposes is limited by thermally induced effects in the beam guidance optics. These transient thermo-optical aberrations lead to a non-static focus shift and a deterioration of the beam quality. To counterbalance these aberrations, thermally self-compensated optical systems are proposed. The design for these optics is based on a combination of several elements that compensate for each other. Via thermo-mechanical FEM-simulations and the calculation of the resultant wavefront distortion, several multi-component systems are evaluated. In a first step, thermally compensated laser windows have been developed and characterized.