Deformable mirrors for intra-cavity use in high-power thin-disk lasers

We present deformable mirrors for the intra-cavity use in high-power thin-disk laser resonators. The refractive power of these mirrors is continuously adaptable from -0.7 m(-1) to 0.3 m(-1), corresponding to radii of curvature ranging between 2.86 m (convex) and 6.67 m (concave). The optimized shape of the mirror membrane enables a very low peak-to-valley deviation from a paraboloid deformation over a large area. With the optical performance of our mirrors being equal to that of standard HR mirrors, we were able to demonstrate the tuning of the beam quality of a thin-disk laser in a range of M-2 = 3 to M-2 = 1 during laser operation at output powers as high as 1.1 kW. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America