Influence of spherical aberrations on fundamental mode beam quality under different laser resonators

• 来源期刊: 中国物理B（英文版）
• 关键词: spherical aberration fundamental mode beam quality diffraction loss resonators design
• 年，卷（期）: 2009,（7）
• 页码范围: 2806-2815
• 页数: 10页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

Spherical aberrations of the thermal lens of the active media are severe when solid state lasers are strongly pumped.The fundamental mode profile deteriorates due to the aberrations. Self-consistent modes of a resonator with aberrations are calculated by using the Fox-Li diffraction iterative algorithm. Calculation results show that the aberration induced fundamental mode beam quality deterioration depends greatly on the resonator design. The tolerance of a flat-flat resonator to the aberration coefficient is about 30λ in the middle of stability, where λ is the wavelength of laser beam. But for a dynamically stable resonator, 2λ of spherical aberration will create diffraction loss of more than 40%, if inappropriate design criteria are used. A birefringence compensated laser resonator with two Nd:YAG rods is experimentally studied. The experimental data are in quite good agreement with simulation results.