HIGH ENERGY LASER WAVEFRONT ANALYSIS

There is a need for a reliable High Energy Laser Wavefront Analyzer (HELWA) to be used for beam quality testing at the Army's High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility (HELSTF). Accurate HEL wavefront measurements are critical to HEL device performance evaluation. Current devices are inflexible and difficult to maintain due to size, complexity, and a dependence of high precision moving parts. This effort will investigate the feasibility of constructing a reliable integrated wavefront sensor suitable to the HEL community and adaptable to other applications. A low maintenance high reliability wavefront analyzer is attainable by integrating innovations from two areas. The first area involves the coupling of commercially available microlenslet technology with modern infrared detector arrays; the resulting compact Hartmann wavefront sensor is a sturdy and adaptable phase and intensity sampling device capable of high spatial and temporal resolution. The second area of innovation encompasses ATA's advanced wavefront reconstruction and wavefront sensor simulation algorithms. By combining these processing, visualization, and diagnostic tools with the appropriate lenslet arrays, optics, and IR cameras, ATA will seek to design a system customized to the Amiy HEL operation, but flexible enough to adapt to other government and commercial applications.