High power pulsed lasers and adaptive optics

Summary form only given. This paper presents the adaptive optical closed loop system with a bimorph mirror as a wavefront corrector and Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor to compensate the aberrations of the high power lasers. Adaptive system can correct the low-order aberrations in the real-time-the frequency of corrected aberrations is less then 25 (30) Hz. The amplitude of such aberrations is about 7 microns. These parameters are mostly determined by utilized Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. The number of corrected aberrations constitutes up to 30th Zernike polynomial (excluding tip-tilt). We present the results of the use of our adaptive system in several TW laser systems such as ATLAS, LULI and Beijing Institute of Physics.