Abstract

Laser plasma interaction studies and the requirements to drive inertial confinement fusion targets at ever higher powers and energies has helped accelerate the development of high power, short pulse, glass laser systems at various laboratories [1]. An important requirement in the development of these laser systems has been the availability of high, power resistant, large aperture polarizers. Dobrowolski et. al. [2] have given the design of a liquid prism polarizer for use with high power excimer lasers thereby overcoming the inherent limitations of the conventional polarizers. Several other authors [3-6] have given different designs of multilayer stacks and their combinations to achieve the desired polarizational properties. These polarizers [3-6] are however designed for a particular wavelength and thus have a very limited bandwidth which can be increased only to a limited extent by increasing the refractive index ratio of the materials. More recently, there has been a considerable interest in using shorter wavelength lasers as a possible fusion driver mainly because of increased absorption efficiency [7]. The existing Nd: glass lasers are being frequency multiplied [8,9] and new laser systems like excimer lasers are being developed [10]. It therefore becomes desirable to have optical components that could be interchangeably used for different wavelengths. In this paper, we report the design of a multiwavelength polarizer simultaneously working at the fundamental and second harmonic of Nd: glass laser. The desired polarizational properties are achieved by suitably combining two or more multilayer stacks with appropriately adjusted thicknesses.

© 1984 Optical Society of America