Use of circularly polarized optical beams to suppress selffocusing instability in a nonlinear cubic medium with repeaters

A theoretical and experimental investigation is made of the suppression of small-scale self-focusing in highpower solid-state laser systems with repeaters by using circular polarization. The improvement in the output focused energy obtained experimentally for circular polarization as compared to that for linear polarization (~1.5 times higher) shows good agreement with the calculated value.