Adaptive optics is a real-time compensation technique using high speed support system for wavefront errors caused by atmospheric turbulence. However, the randomness and instantaneity of atmospheric changing introduce great difficulties to the design of adaptive optical systems. A large number of complex real-time operations lead to large delay, which is an insurmountable problem. To solve this problem, hardware operation and parallel processing strategy are proposed, and a high-speed adaptive optical control system based on DSP is developed. The hardware counter is used to check the system. The results show that the system can complete a closed loop control in 7.1ms, and improve the controlling bandwidth of the adaptive optical system. Using this system, the wavefront measurement and closed loop experiment are carried out, and obtain the good results.
An object-oriented wavefront control method is proposed aiming for excellent near-field homogenization and far-field distribution in an asymmetric amplifying high-power laser system. By averaging the residual errors of the propagating beam, smaller pinholes could be employed on the spatial filters to improve the beam quality. With this wavefront correction system, the laser performance of the main amplifier system in the Shen Guang-III laser facility has been improved. The residual wavefront aberration at the position of each pinhole is below 2 µm (peak-to-valley). For each pinhole, 95% of the total laser energy is enclosed within a circle whose diameter is no more than six times the diffraction limit. At the output of the main laser system, the near-field modulation and contrast are 1.29% and 7.5%, respectively, and 95% of the 1ω (1053 nm) beam energy is contained within a 39.8 µrad circle (6.81 times the diffraction limit) under a laser fluence of 5.8 J cm−2. The measured 1ω focal spot size and near-field contrast are better than the design values of the Shen Guang-III laser facility.
To deal with the problem of phase-shifting interefrometry with different unknown phase shifts, some special designed algorithms have been put forward by former researchers, such as the advanced iterative algorithm (AIA) and the principal component analysis (PCA) demodulation algorithms. This paper proposes a novel solution for it. Firstly, the captured phase-shifting interefrograms are differentiated to remove the additive background term. Then the trigonometric functions of the modulation phase can be extracted with the blind signal separation method. Simulations and experiments have been carried out to validate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm, where both open and closed fringe patterns are involved. Besides, the comparison results with the AIA and PCA algorithms are also provided.
The laser-induced damage detection images used in high-power laser facilities have a dark background, few textures with sparse and small-sized damage sites, and slight degradation caused by slight defocus and optical diffraction, which make the image superresolution (SR) reconstruction challenging. We propose a non-blind SR reconstruction method by using an exquisite mixing of high-, intermediate-, and low-frequency information at each stage of pixel reconstruction based on UNet. We simplify the channel attention mechanism and activation function to focus on the useful channels and keep the global information in the features. We pay more attention on the damage area in the loss function of our end-to-end deep neural network. For constructing a high-low resolution image pairs data set, we precisely measure the point spread function (PSF) of a low-resolution imaging system by using a Bernoulli calibration pattern; the influence of different distance and lateral position on PSFs is also considered. A high-resolution camera is used to acquire the ground-truth images, which is used to create a low-resolution image pairs data set by convolving with the measured PSFs. Trained on the data set, our network has achieved better results, which proves the effectiveness of our method.
Study of phase retrieval technology is quite meaningful, for its wide applications related to many domains, such as adaptive optics, detection of laser quality, precise measurement of optical surface, and so on. Here a hybrid iterative phase retrieval algorithm is proposed, based on fusion of the intensity information in three defocused planes. First the conjugate gradient algorithm is adapted to achieve a coarse solution of phase distribution in the input plane; then the iterative angular spectrum method is applied in succession for better retrieval result. This algorithm is still applicable even when the exact shape and size of the aperture in the input plane are unknown. Moreover, this algorithm always exhibits good convergence, i.e., the retrieved results are insensitive to the chosen positions of the three defocused planes and the initial guess of complex amplitude in the input plane, which has been proved by both simulations and further experiments.
Online segmentation of laser-induced damage on large-aperture optics in high-power laser facilities is challenged by complicated damage morphology, uneven illumination and stray light interference. Fully supervised semantic segmentation algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but rely on plenty of pixel-level labels, which are time-consuming and labor-consuming to produce. LayerCAM, an advanced weakly supervised semantic segmentation algorithm, can generate pixel-accurate results using only image-level labels, but its scattered and partially under-activated class activation regions degrade segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised semantic segmentation method with Continuous Gradient CAM and its nonlinear multi-scale fusion (CG-fusion CAM). The method redesigns the way of back-propagating gradients and non-linearly activates the multi-scale fused heatmaps to generate more fine-grained class activation maps with appropriate activation degree for different sizes of damage sites. Experiments on our dataset show that the proposed method can achieve segmentation performance comparable to that of fully supervised algorithms.
We report an efficient mid-infrared extracavity optical parametric oscillator (OPO) based on the nonlinear crystal BaGa4Se7 pumped by a diode-side-pumped Q-switched Nd:Y3Al5O12 (Nd:YAG) laser. The maximum pulse energy of 1.03 mJ at 4.25 μm is obtained with the repetition rate of 10 Hz and pulse width of 12.6 ns when the pump energy was 13.5 mJ, corresponding to an optical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 7.6% from 1.064 μm to 4.25 μm. The idler wave slope conversion efficiency was 12%. To the best of our knowledge, it is the highest reported conversion efficiency for the compact BaGa4Se7 OPO driven by the Nd:YAG laser.
Beam alignment is crucial to high-power laser facilities and is used to adjust the laser beams quickly and accurately to meet stringent requirements of pointing and centering. In this paper, a novel alignment method is presented, which employs data processing of the two-dimensional power spectral density (2D-PSD) for a near-field image and resolves the beam pointing error relative to the spatial filter pinhole directly. Combining this with a near-field fiducial mark, the operation of beam alignment is achieved. It is experimentally demonstrated that this scheme realizes a far-field alignment precision of approximately 3% of the pinhole size. This scheme adopts only one near-field camera to construct the alignment system, which provides a simple, efficient, and low-cost way to align lasers.
Recently, interferometric null-testing with computer-generated hologram has been proposed as a non-contact and high precision solution to the freeform optics metrology. However, the interferometry solution owns some typical disadvantages such as the strong sensitivity to the table vibrations or temperature fluctuations, which hinders its usage outside the strictly controlled laboratory conditions. Phase retrieval presents a viable alternative to interferometry for measuring wavefront and can provide a more compact, less expensive, and more stable experimental setup. In this work, we propose a novel solution to freeform metrology based on phase retrieval and computer-generated hologram (CGH). The CGH is designed according to the ray tracing method, so as to compensate the aspheric aberration related to the freeform element. With careful alignment of the CGH and the freeform element in the testing system, several defocused intensity images can be captured for phase retrieval. In this paper the experimental results related to a freeform surface with 18×18mm2 rectangular aperture (its peak-to-valley aspherity equals to 193um) are reported, meanwhile, we also have compared them with the measurement results given by the interferometry solution, so as to evaluate the validity of our solution.
In-situ laser-induced surface damage inspection plays a key role in protecting the large aperture optics in an inertial confinement fusion (ICF) high-power laser facility. In order to improve the initial damage detection capabilities, an in-situ inspection method based on image super-resolution and adaptive segmentation method is presented. Through transfer learning and integration of various attention mechanisms, the super-resolution reconstruction of darkfield images with less texture information is effectively realized, and, on the basis of image super-resolution, an adaptive image segmentation method is designed, which effectively adapts to the damage detection problems under conditions of uneven illumination and weak signal. An online experiment was carried out by using edge illumination and the telescope optical imaging system, and the validity of the method was proved by the experimental results.