Abstract

Thermal effects limit the power scalability in high-power thin-disk lasers and can only be reduced to a limited extent by design measures. Besides the compensation of these disturbances, the use of intra-cavity adaptive optical devices also allows beam shaping. In this article, two suitable designs of deformable mirrors (DMs) are presented, characterized and compared. While pneumatically actuated DMs allow a compensation of known disturbing profiles, optically addressed DMs allow to deal with almost arbitrary deformations. This design uses thermoelastic effects due to local heating of the mirror to achieve desired deformations.

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