An Advanced Sensor For Field Characterization of Operational Laser Systems

To field characterize laser systems the laser power, beam divergence, intensity profile and spot size of the laser must be measured with a robust, vibration insensitive system. While some of these parameters can be obtained using conventional components, beam divergence is difficult to measure because of the complexity and vibration sensitivity of typical interferometry based elements. We propose to develop a unique laser parameters sensor based on an extension of WaveFront Sciences' Complete Light Analysis System, which measures near field intensity and phase distributions of the laser beam. The required beam divergence, power, and other parameters are readily obtained through analysis of this data. For other elements such as the laser pulse time-dependence, additional components additional components will be integrated into a single lighweight package that can be controlled from a laptop computer.