Adaptive aberration correction based on ant colony algorithm for solid-state lasers: numerical simulations

We describe an adaptive aberration correction technique based on an ant colony algorithm for solid-state lasers and a general class of other adaptive optics systems. We show that it is possible to compensate phase aberrations without wavefront sensing in this approach, which iteratively adjusts the control voltages of a deformable mirror to maximize certain system performance metrics of the far-field intensity distribution of the laser beam. The effectiveness of this approach is analyzed numerically by use of a 37-element piezoelectric deformable mirror and a variation of the Strehl ratio as the metric. Results demonstrate that this approach can effectively compensate the phase distortions of laser beams and significantly improve beam quality. A comparison indicates that this approach is much faster than a genetic algorithm while achieving almost the same beam quality.