Bimorph adaptive mirrors for all reasons: theory and experiment

In this paper, a good laser beam quality is essential for many scientific and industrial applications. To form such a beam researches have studied several methods. One of the most popular is the use of flexible semipassive bimorph mirror. But until now it was impossible to determine optimal position, shape and number of its electrodes to produce a given mirror surface profile. There has been reported only an optimization of such mirror electrode grid, for example, for optimum reproducing of Zernike polynomials. But during an optimization procedure it is easy to miss an optimal solution or to use an excess or insufficient number of electrodes. That is why it is more practical and universal to determine number, shape and position of the electrodes rather than to optimize them.