Abstract

Solid-state lasers with high average power and high beam quality are of great importance for many applications. However, the thermal load from high pumping levels results in problems such as thermal lensing or stress-induced birefringence.¹ In recent years, in addition to conventional techniques, self adaptive laser resonators based on laser induced gain gratings have successfully demonstrated correction of thermally induced aberrations in solid-state lasers.² This technique has recently been shown to produce distortion corrected beams in a diode pumped, injected seeded system in Nd:YVO₄.³

© 2002 Optical Society of America