Brightness Enhancement of a Solid-State Laser Using an Intra-Cavity Deformable Mirror

摘要

An intra-cavity deformable membrane mirror (DMM) has been used to optimise the brightness of a 15W, diode-pumped, grazing incidence Nd:GdVO_4 laser. In one configuration an order of magnitude improvement of laser beam quality was recorded with negligible drop in output power. Local and global optimum-locating algorithms have been developed to enable automatic optimisation of the laser quality, and have been tested in both intra- and extra-cavity configurations. A novel laser brightness sensor based on second-harmonic-generation has also been developed to assess the progress of the laser towards optimisation. A tip & tilt mirror was also incorporated in the laser resonator cavity and initial tailoring of the algorithm procedure was performed in order to enhance the optimisation capabilities.