The Center for Freeform Optics
An Industry/University Cooperative Research Center

Optical differentiation wavefront sensing with binary pixelated transmission filters

J. QIAO, J. PAPA and X. LIU

wavefront-sensingMonolithic large-scale diffraction gratings are desired to improve the performance of high-energy laser systems and scale them to higher energy, but the surface deformation of these diffraction gratings induce spatio-temporal coupling that is detrimental to the focusability and compressibility of the output pulse. A new deformable-grating-based pulse compressor architecture with optimized actuator positions has been designed to correct the spatial and temporal aberrations induced by grating wavefront errors. An integrated optical model has been built to analyze the effect of grating wavefront errors on the spatio-temporal performance of a compressor based on four deformable gratings. A 1.5-meter deformable grating has been optimized using an integrated finite-element-analysis and genetic-optimization model, leading to spatio-temporal performance similar to the baseline design with ideal gratings.

Optics Express Vol. 23, Issue 20, pp. 25923-25934 (2015) doi: 10.1364/OE.23.025923