ABSTRACT
When high performance is expected, vibrations are becoming a burning issue in adaptive optics systems. For mitigation of these vibrations, in this paper, we propose a method to identify the vibration model. The nonlinear least squares algorithm named the Levenberg-Marquardt method is adapted to acquire the model parameters. The experimental validation of the high performance of vibration mitigation associated with our identification method has been accomplished. Benefiting from this method, vibrations have been significantly suppressed using linear quadratic Gaussian control, where the root-mean-square of the residual vibrations has been reduced down to a portion of a microradian. Moreover, the experimental results show that with the model identified, vibrations ranging from wide low-frequency perturbation to high-frequency vibration peaks can be dramatically mitigated, which is superior to classical control strategies.
ABSTRACT
We present adaptive compensation of intracavity tilts based on detecting the direction of the output beams. We use the initial direction of the output beam when the laser cavity is well collimated for reference. Then the difference between the actual direction of the output beam and the reference is used as feedback to control the intracavity tip/tilt mirror. The relation between the direction of the output beam and the intracavity tilt is investigated with both the Fox-Li method and measurements. A series of experiments demonstrate that intracavity tilts can be well compensated by the proposed method. We have also proved that it is possible to substitute the proposed method for conventional extracavity beam stabilization.
ABSTRACT
In this Letter, we present an adaptive aberration correction system to simultaneously compensate for aberrations and reshaping the beams. A low-order aberration corrector is adapted. In this corrector, four lenses are mounted on a motorized rail, whose positions can be obtained using a ray tracing method based on the beam parameters detected by a wavefront sensor. After automatic correction, the PV value of the wavefront is reduced from 26.47 to 1.91 µm, and the beam quality ß is improved from 18.42 to 2.86 times that of the diffraction limit. After further correction with a deformable mirror, the PV value of the wavefront is less than 0.45 µm, and the beam quality is 1.64 times that of the diffraction limit. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest performance from such a high-power, high-pulse repetition rate Nd:YAG solid-state laser ever built.
ABSTRACT
Adaptive optics is an important technology for improving beam quality in solid-state slab lasers. However, there are uncorrectable aberrations in partial areas of the beam. In the criterion of the conventional least-squares reconstruction method, it makes the zones with small aberrations nonsensitive and hinders this zone from being further corrected. In this paper, a weighted least-squares reconstruction method is proposed to improve the relative sensitivity of zones with small aberrations and to further improve beam quality. Relatively small weights are applied to the zones with large residual aberrations. Comparisons of results show that peak intensity in the far field improved from 1242 analog digital units (ADU) to 2248 ADU, and beam quality ß improved from 2.5 to 2.0. This indicates the weighted least-squares method has better performance than the least-squares reconstruction method when there are large zonal uncorrectable aberrations in the slab laser system.
ABSTRACT
With extremely high sensitivity, the coherent laser communications has a large potential to be used in the long-range and high data-rate free space communication links. However, for the atmospheric turbulent links, the most significant factor that limits the performance of the coherent laser communications is the effect of atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we try to integrate the adaptive optics (AO) to the coherent laser communications and analyze the performances. It is shown that, when the atmospheric turbulence condition D/r0 is not larger than 1, can the coherent laser communication system works well without the correction of an AO system. When it is in the gentle turbulent condition (around D/r0 = 2), only the tip and tilt correction can improve the mixing efficiency and the bit-error rate (BER) significantly. In the moderate (around D/r0 = 10) or relatively strong (around D/r0 = 17) turbulent condition, the AO system has to correct about 9 or 35 turbulent modes or more respectively to achieve a favorable performance. In conclusion, we have demonstrated that the AO technique has great potential to improve the performances of the atmospheric coherent laser communications.
