High average power pulsed phase conjugate laser with birefringence correction. Revision 1

摘要

Nd:YAG rod lasers have been plagued with the inability to go to high average powers because of thermally induced birefringence and focusing. Several methods have been employed to correct for the birefringence and the thermal aberrations of such systems, but place stringent constraints on the laser heads and/or the system alignment. They have developed a scalable Nd: YAG master oscillator/power amplifier (MOPA) laser system which employs a novel phase conjugation scheme to correct both for the material and thermal distortions as well as the thermal birefringence in double pass amplifier systems. This method reduces the double pass depolarization from 42% to less than 2% and is easy to align.