Adaptive compensation of intracavity tilts during lasing through detecting the direction of output beams.

We present adaptive compensation of intracavity tilts based on detecting the direction of the output beams. We use the initial direction of the output beam when the laser cavity is well collimated for reference. Then the difference between the actual direction of the output beam and the reference is used as feedback to control the intracavity tip/tilt mirror. The relation between the direction of the output beam and the intracavity tilt is investigated with both the Fox-Li method and measurements. A series of experiments demonstrate that intracavity tilts can be well compensated by the proposed method. We have also proved that it is possible to substitute the proposed method for conventional extracavity beam stabilization.