Single shot wavefront measurement and correction of femtosecond terawatt lasers

Summary form only given. High power lasers using the chirped pulsed amplification (CPA) technique now frequently achieve terawatt peak power level. During the amplification of the pulse, the wavefront is distorted due to thermal effects in the gain medium, imperfections of the optics, compressor misalignment and B-integral. This leads to a bigger focal spot and thus to a decrease of the peak focused intensity. We present, in this paper, a direct correction of the output beam. The wavefront is measured with an achromatic three wave lateral shearing interferometer (ATWLSI). ATWLSI presents several advantages such as a tunable sensitivity, a self-estimation of the error on the phase measurement and its achromaticity. The correction is achieved with a deformable mirror.