Thermal Lensing | previous | next | feedback |
Definition: a lensing effect induced by temperature gradients
Particularly in high-power lasers, the heating of the gain medium (e.g. a laser crystal) often causes a significant thermal lens through the following mechanisms:
- The gain medium is hotter on the beam axis, compared with the outer regions, typically causing some transverse gradient of the refractive index (thermooptic effect, quantified with the coefficient dn / dT).
- Further index changes can be caused by thermally induced mechanical stress (photoelastic effect, quantified with photoelastic coefficients ρij and the thermal expansion coefficient α).
- Mechanical stress can also lead to bulging of the end faces of the gain medium, so that these also cause lensing. This effect can be important for short laser crystals.
Depending on the situation, these effects can have different relative strength and even sign. In many cases, the first mentioned effect (temperature dependence of the refractive index) is the most important.
Figure 1: Transverse pump intensity distribution (red) and thermal profile (blue), simulated for an 8 mm long end-pumped Nd:YAG rod with 14 W of dissipated power. The distribution in the beam direction is assumed to be homogeneous, which is approximately true for bidirectional pumping and not too strong pump absorption. The temperature profile is approximately parabolic only near the center of the crystal, so that a laser mode with a beam radius equal to that of the pump beam will experience some aberrations.
Calculation of the Dioptric Power
As a simple example, consider a laser gain medium in which there is a uniform pump intensity and a purely radial heat flow. (This situation can occur e.g. in a side-pumped laser rod.) We then have a thermal lens with the dioptric power (inverse focal length)
where Pheat is the dissipated power, A is the pumped area, and κ is the thermal conductivity. The length of the gain medium does not matter, and the thermal lens has no aberrations in that case.
The equation seems to suggest that operating with a larger pumped area and a corresponding larger resonator mode would reduce lensing effects, but a large mode is more sensitive to thermal lensing, which exactly compensates the apparent advantage. The equation also shows that a useful figure of merit for high-power gain media is the ratio of (dn / dT) / κ, which should be as small as possible. Of course, the fraction of the pump power which is converted to heat should also be as small as possible.
For a non-homogeneous distribution of dissipated power, the thermal lens will in general exhibit aberrations (see Figure 1). This is frequently a problem in end-pumped lasers. For example, when pumping with a Gaussian intensity profile, the thermal lens on the beam axis is two times stronger than calculated from the equation above based on the effective mode area, but falls off at larger radii.
Many laser crystals exhibit a positive value of dn / dT of the order of a few times 10−6 K−1, but some (e.g. Nd:YLF) have a negative temperature coefficient, leading to a defocusing lens if that effect is not overcompensated by stress effects. Also, the Raman crystal material Ba(NO3)2 (barium nitride) has a strongly negative dn / dT combined with a low thermal conductivity, leading to strong defocusing e.g. in intracavity Raman-shifted lasers.
Reliable data for calculating the strength of thermal lensing are often difficult to obtain, even for relatively well-known crystal materials. Mainly due to various technical difficulties related to the measurement of such properties, wrong data often occur in the literature. Further, there is a more fundamental problem related to the quantity dn / dT: in various theoretical calculations, the partial derivative of refractive index under conditions of constant strain should be used, whereas measured data usually apply to constant stress [16]. The difference between those values, which can be substantial, arises from the fact that there is also thermal expansion. It can therefore be more sensible to use an effective thermo-optic coefficient derived from measurements of thermal lensing. Even then, it is not easy to separate the effects of bulging of the end faces, the importance of which depends on the crystal geometry.
An in-depth analysis of thermal lensing often requires advanced methods such as finite element analysis (FEA) for the calculation of the temperature and stress fields in the laser crystal. This can be helpful e.g. when designing composite laser crystals (see below), where it is important to know how the effect of additional undoped parts depends on their size. In many cases, however, such calculations are plagued by a lack of data, e.g. concerning the precise pump intensity distribution, the thermal properties of media and mechanical contacts, quenching effects in the gain medium, etc., so that a high precision of the results is often difficult to achieve. Therefore, it is often advantageous to use the more pragmatic approach of working with estimates based on various simplifying assumptions, which greatly reduce the effort required and still offer useful guidance for experiments. Theoretical results may be supplemented with experimental data in order to calibrate certain parameters.
Influence of Geometry
The dependence of the dioptric power of the thermal lens on the beam area can be different for other laser geometries, such as in a thin-disk laser. An at least partially longitudinal heat flow and thus a reduction in thermal lensing may also be achieved with a transparent heat spreader, made of diamond, for example.
Such influences of geometry are very important in the context of power scaling of lasers, and their understanding can be more helpful than e.g. a sophisticated calculation of temperature profiles for any particular configuration.
Coping with Thermal Lensing in Lasers
In principle, a thermal lens can be taken into account in the design of the laser resonator. Difficulties arise from the fact that the dioptric power of the thermal lens depends on the pump power, and that the thermal lens usually has significant aberrations. This can make it difficult to achieve good beam quality. However, a good resonator design can greatly help to reduce the impact of thermal lensing. The resonator design should be made so that changes of the thermal lens do not affect too much the mode sizes in the laser resonator, and that aberrations of the thermal lens have only a small effect. It is also possible to compensate aberrations with additional optical elements in the laser resonator.
The strength of thermal lensing can be reduced in various ways:
- by using a gain medium with low power losses, high thermal conductivity, and small thermo-optical coefficients
- by choosing pump and laser wavelength so as to obtain a small quantum defect
- by cryogenic cooling of the gain medium (→ cryogenic lasers), which improves several parameters with an influence on thermal lensing
- by optimizing the shape of the pump beam
- by optimizing the geometry of the laser head, e.g. by longitudinal heat removal in a thin-disk laser, or by using a composite laser crystal
- by using a waveguide structure for the gain medium; e.g., fiber lasers are immune to thermal lensing effects even at kilowatt output power levels.
Note that thermal lensing may occur not only in the laser gain medium, but also in other optical components, e.g. in Q switches and other optical modulators, Raman-active crystals, and even on dielectric mirrors through bulging of the substrate.
A phenomenon related to thermal lensing is thermally induced birefringence, which can lead to depolarization loss and to polarization-dependent astigmatism.
Thermal Lensing Outside of a Laser
Thermal lensing can also be significant outside a laser resonator when a laser beam with high average power is sent through a transparent optical device such as a lens, a beam splitter or a protection window. As a result, the position of a focus behind such an element may depend on the optical power level. This can happen e.g. in high power laser cutting heads.
Bibliography
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| [15] | G. Wagner et al., “Simulations of thermal lensing of a Ti:sapphire crystal end-pumped with high average power”, Opt. Express 13 (20), 8045 (2005) |
| [16] | S. Chénais et al., “On thermal effects in solid-state lasers: the case of ytterbium-doped materials”, Prog. Quantum Electron. 30 (12), 89 (2006) |
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See also: lasers, gain media, beam quality, depolarization loss, composite laser crystals, thin-disk lasers, cryogenic lasers, power scaling of lasers, Spotlight article 2006-07-10, Spotlight article 2007-01-15
Categories: lasers, physical foundations
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