Abstract
The Foucaut knife-edge test has been used as a simple and effective metrology process to characterize the transmitted wavefront of optical systems for more than a century. We apply this method to estimate the optical quality of the transmitted wavefront in the mid-spatial frequencies domain. We compare the results obtained by this approach and interferometry to estimate RMS on three calibrated reference phase plates and evidence a difference smaller than 9%. The Foucaut knife-edge method is applied to a liquid cooled Nd:phopshate split slab amplifier. This method is shown to be particularly suitable to optimize liquid cooled slab amplifiers down to the sub-nanometer RMS quality values that are generally required in high-power laser systems.
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