Abstract

To account for the internal thermal effects of solid-state lasers, a method using a back propagation (BP) neural network integrated with a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is developed, which is a new wavefront distortion correction technique. In particular, by using a slab laser model, a series of fiber pumped sources are employed to form a controlled array to pump the gain medium, allowing the internal temperature field of the gain medium to be designed by altering the power of each pump source. Furthermore, the BP artificial neural network is employed to construct a nonlinear mapping relationship between the power matrix of the pump array and the thermally induced wavefront aberration. Lastly, the suppression of thermally induced wavefront distortion can be achieved by changing the power matrix of the pump array and obtaining the optimal pump light intensity distribution combined using the PSO algorithm. The minimal beam quality β can be obtained by optimally distributing the pumping light. Compared with the method of designing uniform pumping light into the gain medium, the theoretically computed single pass beam quality β value is optimized from 5.34 to 1.28. In this numerical analysis, experiments are conducted to validate the relationship between the thermally generated wavefront and certain pumping light distributions.

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