Modelling diameter measurement errors of a wide-aperture laser beam with flat profile

Abstract

Work is devoted to modeling instrumental errors of a laser beam diameter measurement using a method based on a lambertian transmissive screen. Super-Lorenz distribution was used as a model of the beam. To determine the effect of each parameter on the measurement error were performed computational experiments, results of which were approximated by analytic functions. There were obtained the errors depending on relative beam size, spatial non-uniformity of the transmission screen, lens distortion, physical vignetting, beam tilt, CCD spatial resolution, ADC resolution of a camera. There was shown that the error can be less then 1 %.

Keywords

• laser beam
• laser beam diameter
• error modeling
• super-Lorenzian distribution