To compensate for the gain saturation effect in the high-energy laser amplifier, a modified polarization beam combination (PBC) method is introduced to reshape temporal waveform of the injected laser pulse to obtain a controlled high-energy laser pulse shape after amplification. One linearly polarized beam is divided into two orthogonal polarized beams, which spatially recombine together collinearly after propagating different optical paths with relative time delay in PBC structure. The obtained beam with polarization direction being rotated by the following half wave plate is divided and combined again to reform a new beam in another modified polarization beam structure. The reformed beam is injected into three cascaded laser amplifiers. The amplified pulse shape can be controlled by the incident pulse shape and amplifier gain, which is agreeable to the simulation by the Frank–Nodvik equations. Based on the simple method, the various temporal waveform of output pulse with tunable 7 to 20 ns pulse duration can be obtained without interferometric fringes.

Date Published: 16 June 2016
PDF: 8 pages
Opt. Eng. 55(6) 066111 doi: 10.1117/1.OE.55.6.066111
Published in: Optical Engineering Volume 55, Issue 6