Evaluation of beam quality for high-power lasers

Abstract

High-power lasers are widely used in various scientific, industrial and military applications. There is currently a desire for precision measurement the beam quality of high-power lasers in order to evaluate the performance of the laser systems and the operational effectiveness of chemical and solid-state high-power laser weapons. There are many methods of beam quality determination, such as beam parameter product, encircled energy ratio BQ, Strehi ratio, diffraction limit factor β and beam propagation factor M². In this paper, a beam quality measurement device is developed for high-power lasers. This device consists of a beam attenuator with large reflective ratio and minimal wavefront distortion, an off-axis parabolic mirror, an imaging lens and an infrared focal plane array detector. The laser beam intensity distribution, beam width, beam divergence and beam pointing stability can be obtained in real-time and the beam quality can be evaluated by the various determinations through imaging process. Advantages and disadvantages of these beam quality determination for evaluation the performance of the high-power lasers are analyzed and discussed. The measurement uncertainties of relative parameters are also analyzed and discussed.