Advancing laser through adaptive optics technology The ADAPTOOL project focused on the development of active control of the spatial phase of Europe's high power laser instalations. Thereby, advanced liquid crystal spatial light modulators were designed for large aperture and high damage threshold purposes. Industrial Technologies Lasers are widely used as diagnostic tools in several laser-matter interaction experiments. In these experiments, it is of primary importance that the focal spot is of high quality. Therefore, many European laser facilities seek to amend this quality by improving various related parameters, such as the percentage of the encircled energy, the diffraction limit number or the Strehl ratio. Enhanced focal spot is highly related to a decreased focal spot diameter in case of an effective remote control of the wave front of the laser beam. Most commonly, optical components, thermal distortions in the main amplifiers and non linear propagation effects cause wave front distortions. Answering this need, adaptive optical devices can be placed in the beam to control the wave front, whose measurement allows the effective control of the adaptive device. Until now, adaptive optical devices have been limited to military equipment due to their high costs. Wave front sensors, deformable mirrors and liquid crystal spatial light modulators are very complicated and expensive tools. Motivated by this, the ADAPTOOL project aimed at determining the most cost effective and technically appropriate solutions to the adaptive beam correction requirement for Europe's large-scale laser facilities. For this reason, new spatial light modulators that feature large apertures were realised. They may find a number of useful applications in the field of high power laser wave front correction. In addition, they may be employed in the areas of low laser power or energy, for instance in continuous wave applications when high spatial resolution is required. An SME interested in designing and manufacturing spatial light modulator components for laser wave front correction is sought for further collaboration.
