Integration of adaptive optics into high energy laser modeling and simulation

ENS Donald Puent, USN

We investigate the corrective effect of adaptive optics (AO) on High Energy Laser (HEL) beam propagation through atmospheric turbulence. The effect of adaptive optics systems was first integrated into a laser propagation scaling code, ANCHOR, that was developed within the Direct Energy (DE) research group at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). Using a host of plausible input parameters, we then compare the estimated target irradiance increase accomplished by various adaptive optics systems. In various cases, adaptive optics is shown to substantially increase the effective range of HELs.