Dual phase conjugation mirror resonator with application to diode-pumped lasers.

摘要

A new method to design a resonator using dual phase conjugation mirrors has been developed and presented. The application of optical phase conjugation has been developed mainly using active optical materials and successfully applied for aberration compensation, optical communications systems, image-processing and optical storage devices. Only recently, ever-refining semiconductor manufacturing technology and new optical materials have been used to build passive optical devises that can do ‘phase conjugation’. Research has been active in the area of high quality beam shaping, laser resonator design, etc. Passive phase conjugation has an additional benefit in choosing the desired mode inside a resonator, however, most of previous research has shown that there are practical limitations in the maximum achievable Fresnel number and mode discrimination capabilities. A deterministic approach to design resonators with a single phase conjugation mirror has been presented. However, to date no methods for the design of a dual phase conjugation mirror resonators have been presented. A new iterative design method is developed in this thesis and applied to design a resonator with axially symmetric geometry and three-dimensional geometry.; Second, studies on optimum phase quantization are presented. To reduce manufacturing cost and quantization losses, we need to balance the minimum feature size, phase quantization method, and diffraction loss produced by less-than-perfect phase conjugation optics. For laser systems, it is necessary to reduce the diffraction loss for the fundamental mode. The phase conjugation optics must be designed to have minimum loss for the fundamental mode while providing higher loss to the higher order mode. The diffractive optic element (DOE) is used to implement the desired phase profile for phase conjugation and different quantization methods are explained and compared each other using a bare resonator.; In this thesis, a dual phase conjugation mirror (PCM) resonator has been proposed for the design of a highly efficient compact diode pumped laser. The proposed design can be used to form a large fundamental mode having a super gaussian mode shape to extract the pump energy more efficiently by providing higher slope efficiency than conventional gaussian mode matching. It is shown that the thermo-opto-elastic effect can be modeled and combined into the design of PCM mirrors with detailed consideration of pump-mode matching. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)