Adaptive Optics for the control of laser beam in gravitational wave interferometers

In this paper we present the experimental results of the application of Adaptive Optics (AO) technique to control the laser beam in gravitational wave interferometer. In particular, we focus our attention on two specific applications. The first one is the reduction of laser geometrical aberrations by using an AO system based on interferometric wavefront detection. The second application is the use of deformable mirrors for the generation of the non-Gaussian flat laser beams proposed for the reduction of thermoelastic noise in future detectors.