High-quality self-adaptive Nd-YAG laser oscillators using optically-induced thermal holograms

Summary form only given. Holographic Laser Oscillators (HLOs) are of considerable interest as a mean of self-adaptive correction of distortions in laser systems. The HLO operates by injecting an external writing laser signal in a self-intersecting loop in the nonlinear medium (the Injected HLO) or with additional feedback from an output coupler where there is no need of an external writing laser signal to initiate the cavity, which is the case of the Self-starting HLO. In the present work we show results for the performance of both an Injected HLO and a Self-starting HLO. In both cases an optically induced thermal grating constitutes the holographic element in the loop cavity.