Analysis of temperature-induced liquid crystal phase control beam quality deterioration

The liquid crystal optical phased array (LCOPA) is the core device of next-generation beam control technology. Improving its laser-induced damage threshold is one of the current research hot spots. Aiming at the scene of higher power laser incidence, the degradation degree of LCOPA phase modulation performance should be evaluated. Based on the traditional quarter-wave plate method, this paper realizes fast and direct measurement of the phase modulation of the liquid crystal to the incident laser. The verification test found that when the core temperature is 33 ℃, the corresponding maximum phase aberration is 3.6 rad. At the same time, based on the measured phase modulation results, this paper studies the deterioration process of the beam quality of the outgoing light. Analysis results show that the deterioration of beam quality is less than 20% when the core temperature of the liquid crystal phase shifter changes less than 10 ℃.