Quasi Q-switch regime of CO2 laser generation

Adaptive optical elements are known to be used for the correction of a various types of wavefront distortions of the light beam penetrated through some inhomogeneous media. But starting from late 70(th) several types of experiments showing the efficiency of the use of adaptive systems to improve the laser beam quality were carried out Almost all these experiments were made on the CO2 high power lasers (up to Mwatt) and the obtained results were really promising. Later, in 80(th) and 90(th) adaptive technique was applied to control for the radiation of various industrial lasers - YAG, excimer, copper-vapor(6). But usually authors were trying to influence on the output mode structure of the laser beam by means of the intracavity active mirror. For CO2 laser there is also the necessity and the possibility to use active intracavity mirror to obtain quasi Q-switch regime of generation. The idea of application of active corrector is to change the parameters of laser resonator, the stability factor as well as lazing characteristics. Usually Q-switch pulses in CO2 lasers are obtained by putting mechanical shutter inside laser cavity. To avoid undesirable beam transformations the beam is to be focused inside laser resonator and shutter is to be put exactly in the focal plane(2). To overcome these problems we suggest to use active deformable mirrors as the modulating element - the bimorph one or/and "cylindrical".