Hodge Cleveland (coalrange30)

A polarized laser beam steering system using multiply cascaded rotating polarization gratings (PGs) is presented. The rotating PGs steer incident circularly polarized beams with high optical throughput because the theoretical limitation of the PG diffraction efficiency is 100%. CMC-Na The system also offers more rapid rotation when compared with wedge prism pairs because of the weight of the PGs. The beam steering performance was analyzed theoretically for schemes using two and four rotating PGs. The system's feasibility was demonstrated experimentally by projecting Lissajous and raster patterns using PGs fabricated from photocrosslinkable polymer liquid crystal films via a photo-alignment technique. The steered beam's diffraction efficiency and ellipticity were maintained at 83∼89% and 96∼99%, respectively, during PG rotation. This beam steering system will be applicable to light detection and ranging, optical imaging, and laser displays.The temporal contrast of ultrashort and ultraintense laser pulses can significantly influence the laser-plasma interactions. As the optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) has been widely adopted in these laser facilities, the inherent optical parametric fluorescence, exhibiting a pedestal in the time window of the pump pulse, has become a significant problem. In this paper, we investigated experimentally its influence on the contrast of the compressed pulses at 808 nm using a multistage OPCPA amplifier. Compared to the highest value of 108 ever reported in the literature for such a type of regime, by adjusting the pump energy allocation between OPCPA stages and controlling the gain of small signal regime, we for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, realized a 1011 temporal contrast in a pure nanosecond OPCPA design at a gain exceeding 7×108, without adopting any other noise cleaning methods, such as picosecond OPCPA, cross-polarized wave generation, etc. This indicates that the OPCPA has a very significant potential for contrast improvement and to become a candidate for the future high-energy amplifiers in ultrashort high-power laser facilities.The power scaling of Er-Yb co-doped fiber lasers and amplifiers has been limited by the bottleneck effect of energy-transfer saturation between Yb ions and Er ions. The emerging method of Er-Yb co-doped fiber amplifiers pumped by Yb-doped fiber lasers is considered as an approach to enhance the threshold of the bottleneck effect. In this paper, we quantitatively characterize the threshold of the bottleneck effect via the method of extreme value analysis of the second-order derivative. The method facilitates the optimization of the amplifier configuration. Afterward, we numerically investigate the bottleneck effect of various Er-Yb co-doped fiber amplifiers off-peak cladding-pumped by 10××nm Yb-doped fiber lasers for what we believe, to the best of our knowledge, is the first time. The result shows that the most optimal configuration is long gain fiber over 20 m pumped by a 1020-1025 nm fiber laser, with more than two times the output limit of a conventional laser diode pumping scheme. The essential factors of an amplifier are discussed afterward, including the pump-launching direction, the optimization of large-mode-area fiber, the core-cladding ratio, the concentration of doping ions, the nonlinearity limit, and the distribution of the heat load.In this paper, we propose to explore the infrared (IR) behavior of multilayer diffractive optical elements (MLDOEs). IR MLDOEs are designed for the development of space instruments dedicated to Earth observation. The phase effect of the MLDOE on a paraxial plane wave is studied using exact kinoform shapes for each layer. The modeling of the optical path difference uses thin element approximation. Until now, MLDOEs have been designed and simulated on ray-tracing software with binary diffractive layers. In this study, after passing through the MLDOE, the field is propagated using a m