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Branch Point Mitigation Of Thermal Blooming Phase Compensation Instability, Mark F. Spencer
Branch Point Mitigation Of Thermal Blooming Phase Compensation Instability, Mark F. Spencer
Theses and Dissertations
Thermal blooming can have a major impact on high-energy laser (HEL) beam propagation in the atmosphere. In theory, an adaptiveoptics (AO) system can mitigate the nonlinear optical effects induced by thermal blooming; however, when a single deformable mirror is used for phase-only compensation, analysis predicts the possibility of instability. This instability is appropriately termed phase compensation instability (PCI) and arises with the time-dependent development of spatial perturbations found within the HEL beam. These spatial perturbations act as local hot spots that produce negative-lens-like optical effects in the atmosphere. An AO system corrects for the hot spots by applying positive-lens-like phase …