ANALYSIS OF THE SPATIAL SCALES OF OPTICAL INHOMOGENEITIES IN ACTIVE MEDIA OF HIGH-POWER GAS-FLOW LASER-AMPLIFIERS

A harmonic analysis was made of the spatial scales of regular optical inhomogeneities in high-power laser amplifiers with a continuously flo wing active medium. The wavefronts of the probe radiation reconstructe d by interferometry made it possible to determine the distribution of the Strehl number over the spatial scales of inhomogeneities in the ac tive medium of a cw chemical laser. The greatest contribution to the o verall level of optical distortions in this laser came from a large-sc ale inhomogeneity, whereas small-scale periodic perturbations of the p hase had practically no influence on the divergence of the output radi ation, because their amplitude did not exceed the permissible limit (1 rad).