Intracavity adaptive correction of a 10-kW solid state heat-capacity laser

The Solid-State, Heat-Capacity Laser (SSHCL), under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a large aperture (100 cm{sup 2}), confocal, unstable resonator requiring near-diffraction-limited beam quality. There are two primary sources of the aberrations in the system: residual, static aberrations from the fabrication of the optical components and predictable, time-dependent, thermally-induced index gradients within the gain medium. A deformable mirror placed within the cavity is used to correct the aberrations that are sensed externally with a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. Although it is more challenging than external correction, intracavity correction enables control of the mode growth within the resonator, resulting in the ability to correct a more aberrated system longer. The overall system design, measurement techniques and correction algorithms are discussed. Experimental results from initial correction of the static aberrations and dynamic correction of the time-dependent aberrations are presented.