Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin scattering phase conjugation may be applied to laser amplifiers to provide near diffraction-limited performance with relaxed optical and thermal requirements. In addition, multiple amplifier modules can be coherently combined via SBS. A comprehensive effort has been performed at TRW to understand SBS physics and scaling to develop design requirements for phase conjugated laser amplifiers and to determine scaling limitations. Data and models are discussed that quantify phase conjugation performance in terms of phase fidelity and reflectivity as a function of key design parameters. Energy and pulse duration scaling issues have been examined. Phase conjugation fidelity has been measured as a function of input aberration magnitude and spatial frequency. The effect of both random and periodic aberrations as well as the effects of beam coherence length and SBS cell length have been investigated. Design criteria have been developed and experimentally verified to achieve coherent coupling of multiple beams.

© 1989 Optical Society of America