Preliminary mode distortion measurements on the Jefferson Lab IRFEL

We previously reported analytical calculations of mirror distortion in a high power FEL with a near-concentric cavity. Naive assumptions about the FEL power vs. distortion led us to believe that mirror losses were much lower than expected. Recently we have directly measured the mode size and beam quality as a function of power using a resonator with a center wavelength of 5 microns. The resonator mirrors were calcium fluoride. This material exhibits a large amount of distortion for a given power but, due to the negative slope of refractive index v temperature, adds almost no optical phase distortion on the laser output. The mode in the cavity can thus be directly calculated from the measurements at the resonator output. The presence of angular jitter produced results inconsistent with cold cavity expectations. Removing the effects of the angular jitter produces results in reasonable agreement with analytical models assuming mirror losses comparable to the original expectations.