Laser Beam Too Big to Profile? Reduce It!

Ok, so obviously if your laser beam is too big you can just use a beam reducer to get it to fit into your camera.

End of story, right?

Well, not exactly.

Use a laser beam reducer on the camera to profiler the laser

There are a few issues you might need to consider.

First, don’t damage the beam profiler

Be careful.  A reduction of three times increases your laser’s intensity by a factor of nine.  So be sure that you don’t accidentally take a low power laser beam and make it too strong for your profiler or ND filters to handle.

If this is the case, you may very well need to add some beam splitters before the laser beam reducer.

Choose the best beam reducer for the job

There are a number of different choices when it comes to reducing the size of your laser beam.

First, you can use either a reimaging or Galilean telescoping method.  The main question here is whether your laser beam is collimated and whether you intend to measure M2:

This blog post discusses more about these two methods.

Finally, you’ll need to consider wavelength, the amount of reduction necessary, and whether you need beam splitters in order to narrow down your search to the precise model that fits your laser.

Speak to an Ophir-Spiricon representative to help you get the best beam profiler setup for your laser.