An adaptive optical system for controlling laser radiation

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive optical system intended for focusing the radiation of powerful processing lasers. The system consists of a wave-front corrector, a wave-front meter, and a software-hardware system for controlling the corrector. A flexible bimorph mirror is used as a corrector. An M2 sensor is used to analyze the radiation-focusing quality, making it possible to estimate such parameters of the laser radiation as the diameter, the divergence angle, and the quality parameter M2. The bimorph mirror is controlled by means of a combined method, based on gradient methods of searching for the extremum and a genetic algorithm. The system makes it possible to correct low-order aberrations and to estimate the focusing efficiency of the laser radiation.