Results of measurements of laser beams of high-power lasers by Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensor

In this presentation, we discuss the advantages of the use of SHWS for detail examination of the laser beam quality. The results of measurements of high-power solid state lasers will be presented. The use of such sensors in the closed loop for adaptive optical system allowed to improve the beam quality and achieve the diffraction limited corrected laser beam. The main advantage of laser beam examination by SHWS is a lot of output parameters which could be obtained both directly from measurements (such as magnitude of wavefront aberrations, phase and intensity distributions in near field) and by calculations (such as intensity distributions in far field).