Influence of spherical aberrations on fundamental mode beam quality under different laser resonators

Spherical aberrations of the thermal lens of the active media are severe when solid state lasers are strongly pumped. The fundamental mode profile deteriorates due to the aberrations. Self-consistent modes of a resonator with aberrations are calculated by using the Fox--Li diffraction iterative algorithm. Calculation results show that the aberration induced fundamental mode beam quality deterioration depends greatly on the resonator design. The tolerance of a flat--flat resonator to the aberration coefficient is about 30\lambda in the middle of stability, where \lambda is the wavelength of laser beam. But for a dynamically stable resonator, 2\lambda of spherical aberration will create diffraction loss of more than 40%, if inappropriate design criteria are used. A birefringence compensated laser resonator with two Nd:YAG rods is experimentally studied. The experimental data are in quite good agreement with simulation results.