Wavefront instabilities in thin glass mirrors

LMJ and LIL are two French high power lasers dedicated to fusion and plasma experiments. These laser beams involve hundreds of rather large optical components, the clear aperture of the beams being 400*400 mm2 . Among these components, an adaptive mirror is used to correct wavefront distortions in the amplification section. A simple design has been chosen with push/pull actuators glued on the backside of a thin glass plate (9 mm). To ensure the bonding mechanical steadiness, we need enough roughness on this backside. That is why it is ground. We noticed figure instabilities on several of these ground backside substrates. Those wavefront distortions can be of several hundreds of nanometers. We designed a specific mount to avoid the possibility of measurement discrepancies due to mechanical mounting. We noticed then significant evolutions over a time-scale of a few months. The possibility of slow stress variations in the ground backside has then been considered. It has been known for a long time that a ground surface is in a compressive state and consequently tends to take a convex shape, this effect being named Twyman effect after its discoverer. Anyway, as far as we know, there is still doubt on the physical mechanisms involved and no publication has been made on the fluctuations of this effect. We wish to expose here results that led us to believe that instabilities are also linked to the external stress which is seen during transport or storage. Finally, we present the experiments we put in place on samples to improve our knowledge on this phenomenon and to test potential solutions. (authors)