Abstract

Stimulated Raman scattering provides the potential for reducing aberrations on laser beams by transferring the energy from a highly aberrated pump beam to a high-quality Stokes beam without transferring the structure on the pump beam. We will describe the results of experiments in which a pump beam at 120 times its diffraction limit was used to amplify a diffraction-limited Stokes beam without adding distortions to the Stokes beam. At a conversion efficiency of 30% the resulting increase in far-field intensity of the Stokes beam relative to the original distorted pump beam was 5000. Use of a novel beam segmenter to achieve these results will be described.

© 1985 Optical Society of America