A system for the compensation of thermally induced birefringence in laser rods that consists of two identical Nd:YAG laser rods, a telescope to image the principal planes of the rods onto each other and a 90 degrees quartz rotator to change the state of polarization between the rods has been set up, and its sensitivity to transversal and longitudinal misalignment has been investigated experimentally. A theoretical model to describe the increase of depolarization that is due to misalignment has been developed and compared with the experimental results.
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