Laser enhancements for Lunar Laser Ranging at 532 nm

Abstract

This article exposes how we improved (by more than a factor of four) the green Lunar Laser Ranging instrumental sensitivity of the French telemetric station of the “Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur” in 2012. The primary reason for this success is the doubling of the pulse energy of our green Nd:YAG laser, reaching now 200 mJ at 10 Hz. This first gain is due to the replacement (inside our oscillator cavity) of the dye cell with a CR4+:YAG crystal saturable absorber. Complementary spatial beam profile improvements are also described, regarding polarisation, flashlamp geometry and specific lens arrangements (to exclude ghosts from focusing on the 8 m long amplification chain). Those combined laser enhancements pave the way to future science breakthrough linked to quasi-millimetric determination of the Earth–Moon dynamics (Murphy, 2013). Jointly, we propose an empirical thermal lensing model, varying with the cycle ratio of the flashlamps. Our model connects Koechner’s (1970) continuous pumping to our intermittent pumping case, with a “normalised heating coefficient” equalling 0.05 only if the electrical lamp input power is equal to 6 kW and scaling as this [electrical input power into the lamps] to the power of [half the pumping cycle ratio]. Keywords: Lunar Laser Ranging, Thermal lensing, Optical design