Abstract
Thermal blooming is the critical phase-distortion degrading factor preventing a ground-based high-energy laser system from achieving a diffraction-limited irradiance profile at a distant target. Adaptive optical systems have been used to correct thermal-blooming-induced phase variation by applying the proper amount of each correcting mode (tilt, defocus, astigmatism, and coma) to the entire aperture. I have developed the analytical expression for these correcting modes,1 which are represented by Zernike polynomials for a uniform beam, and I have also explored the Zernike decomposition of phase variation for the Gaussian beam. In this paper, I present the analytic expression for the phase-variation decomposition for the Gaussian beam in the infinite and truncated cases. As a result, the expressions are reduced to error functions in terms of beam diameter, beam waist, and wind velocity. I compare these results with those of the uniform-beam case and obtain the steady-state limit, i.e., when the elapsed time is longer than the wind-clearing time.
© 1990 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
Myung Hun Lee
WW2 OSA Annual Meeting (FIO) 1989
DAVID CHAMBERS, T. KARR, P. CRAMER, J. MORRIS, and J. VIECELLI
CTUH52 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1990
L. P. Schelonka
PTu062 International Quantum Electronics Conference (IQEC) 1992