Mitigating thermal blooming effect of seawater using self-rotating beam.

When the high-power lasers propagate in seawater, the thermal blooming (TB) effect can cause wavefront distortion, which severely affects the beam quality. Here we proposed a potential approach to reduce the thermally-induced wavefront distortion by using the self-rotating beam in seawater. This approach using the self-rotating beam can directly rotate the intensity distribution of the laser beam and thus break the accumulation path of thermally-induced wavefront distortion, contributing to the improvement of beam quality. Results show that, the self-rotating beam with an appropriate rotation frequency can well mitigate the thermal blooming effect in seawater, exhibiting excellent performance in reducing beam expansion, beam centroid drift and beam quality degradation. • An approach of using self-rotating beam to suppress thermal blooming effect of seawater is proposed. • Physical mechanism why self-rotating beam can suppress thermal blooming is explained. • Influence of rotation frequency, power density, beam width and helical charge on beam quality is obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]