Design and characterization of innovative optical prism for four-degree-of-freedom fast steering mirror active laser compensation system

Abstract

In this study, an innovative four-degree-of-freedom (4-DOF) compensation prism is designed for fast steering mirror active laser compensation systems. In addition to improving the disadvantages of the commercially available compensation systems, such as a larger number of components and longer optical paths, the proposed system has further enhanced the shortcoming of high sensitivity to the laser by using double Porro prisms as 4-DOF compensation prisms proposed in a previous study. The prism proposed in this study reduces the sensitivity to the laser while maintaining two translations and two rotations in 4-DOF control characteristic for laser, thereby improving the resolution of the system to control the laser. First, Zemax was used to build the overall system and evaluate the system characteristics. Then, the skew-ray tracing method and homogeneous coordinate transformation matrix were used to build the mathematical model of the compensation prism and analyze the sensitivity of the proposed prism to the laser. Finally, the closed-loop algorithm was established and the system was completely built on the optical table for experiments to compare the results between the laser before and after compensation by the proposed prism. In addition, the resolution of the proposed prism is compared with the double Porro prisms.