Performance of Laser Beam Wavefront Sensor.

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)

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 1983
Accession Number
ADA125432

Entities

People

  • C. P. Wang

Organizations

  • The Aerospace Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Sensors
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustic Waves
  • Acousto-Optic Modulators
  • Amplifiers
  • Beat Signals
  • Corporations
  • Detectors
  • Diffraction
  • Frequency
  • Hydrogen Fluoride Lasers
  • Laser Beams
  • Lasers
  • Measurement
  • Modulators
  • Phase Detectors
  • Scanners
  • Scanning
  • Wavefronts

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Inertial Navigation Systems.
  • Optical Physics and Photonics.

Technology Areas

  • Directed Energy