Low-coherece laser based lens array beam smoothing techique

Abstract

The experimental study of laser-driven material state equation puts forward extremely high requirements for the uniformity and stability of the target spot intensity distribution, and these two characteristics greatly determine the accuracy and repeatability of the experimental results. In this paper, a beam smoothing scheme combining diffraction-weakened lens array (LA) with induced spatial incoherent (ISI) technique based on low-coherence laser is proposed to solve the problems, that is, the uniformity and stability of the target spot intensity distribution in the material state equation experiments driven with narrow-band coherent laser. The super-Gaussian soft aperture used in our scheme can improve the intensity fluctuation caused by the hard-edge diffraction of the lens elements, and the temporal smoothing technique, ISI, can reduce the interference effect between the lens array elements. The speckle patterns of target spot, which are caused by interference between beamlets and determine the high nonuniformity, will randomly reconstruct after each coherent time. The high-frequency components are further smoothed by the time-average effect. In broadband high-power laser devices, ISI can be combined with LA by making the lens elements with different thickness values. This scheme can enhance the focal spot uniformity and improve the tolerance of the system to the wavefront phase distortion. The influence of wavefront phase distortion on target surface uniformity and stability are analyzed. The simulation results show that this smoothing scheme significantly reduces the target spot nonuniformity, improves the tolerance of random wavefront phase distortion, and presents a uniform and stable target spot intensity distribution. The nonuniformity of target spot will be reduced to about 10% after 10 ps, and about 3% after 100 ps. In addition, statistical analysis shows that the peak-to-valley value and the nonuniformity of the target spot intensity distribution are strongly correlated with the gradient of root-mean-square of the wavefront phase distortion. Using this method, the tolerance range of the wavefront phase distortion can be given according to the requirements of the experiments, which has reference value for designing and optimizing the laser driver parameters in the state equation experiment.