Thermal blooming induced by artificial aerosol with CW laser

In propagation of high power laser through atmosphere, the affection to thermal blooming by aerosol is a research field. This paper reports the experiment result of thermal blooming effect, which is induced by a group of water particle absorbing energy of CW Ar+ laser propagating. Our system includes an aerosol box, some right-angle-reflectors. By mean of increasing of the absorption of the particle, we observed the thermal blooming phenomenon of laser interacting with aerosol. When the density of droplet in the box increases, the laser beam outputting from the box moves down. And the size at the vertical direction becomes small because of the convection of air heated by the aerosol absorbing laser energy. When the density of particles decreases, the beam will go back to the initial location. The experiment shows that aerosol can induce the thermal blooming of high power laser.