Paper
1 May 1990 Instabilities of atmospheric laser propagation
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The 'thermal blooming' nonlinearity associated with lasers' atmospheric propagation causes several other propagation instabilities which limit the maximum power transmissible by the atmosphere; these are stimulated thermal Rayleigh scattering, the closed-loop instability, the phase-compensation instability, and, in the case of a repetitively-pulsed laser, the stimulated thermal Brillouin scattering instability. These instabilities, which are excited by optical turbulence along the atmospheric path and by noise of the laser beam, grow through the creation of three-dimensional filament or ribbon structures in the atmosphere which are correlated to disturbances of the laser beam. Phase and intensity compensation can be implemented in principle, via special arrangements of such phase-only correctors as deformable mirrors.
© (1990) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Thomas J. Karr "Instabilities of atmospheric laser propagation", Proc. SPIE 1221, Propagation of High-Energy Laser Beams Through the Earth's Atmosphere, (1 May 1990); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.18327
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Cited by 6 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Atmospheric propagation

Thermal blooming

Laser beam propagation

Earth's atmosphere

Turbulence

Wave propagation

Deformable mirrors

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