Accession Number:

ADA125432

Title:

Performance of Laser Beam Wavefront Sensor.

Descriptive Note:

Technical rept.,

Corporate Author:

AEROSPACE CORP EL SEGUNDO CA AEROPHYSICS LAB

Personal Author(s):

• Wang,C. P.

Report Date:

1983-02-01

Pagination or Media Count:

35.0

Abstract:

Laser beam wavefront measurement is important for laser beam quality evaluation and beam control. Reported in this paper is a laser beam wavefront sensor consisting of a phase detector and a scanner. With the use of this sensor, the wavefront phase profile across a laser beam has been obtained. The major advantages of this technique are that it is fast, sensitive, and compact. Other features are electric scanning, self-alignment, noise cancellation, and no drift. Wavefront sensor operational principles, features, and experimental results are presented. The sensitivity of the sensor was 5 deg. This sensitivity corresponds to the change of beam quality parameter, the Strehl ratio, by 1. Hence it is a sensitive beam quality measurement technique. Author

Descriptors:

• *LASER BEAMS
• MIRRORS
• HETERODYNING
• BEAM SPLITTING
• WAVEFRONTS
• ACOUSTOOPTICS

Subject Categories:

• Lasers and Masers
• Optics

Distribution Statement:

APPROVED FOR PUBLIC RELEASE