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C. Franke, K. Fritsch, O. Pronin , N. Chunosov

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Problem

We regularly need to measure the laser beam profile of femtosecond lasers in the lab at each workstation. This beam characterization is necessary to ensure that the mode-matching of our multipass cells fits accurately to our customers' lasers. Additionally, we frequently include beam profilers with our modules as a useful tool to facilitate the remote installation of our pulse shortening (MIKSs) modules. Unfortunately, ordering a new commercial-grade laser beam profiler in every case is not affordable, and the full feature set is mostly not required for our application. 

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Solution

We decided to sponsor the development of minimalistic, easy-to-use laser beam profiler software for widely available industrial cameras and open source the whole project under the GNU GPL v3.0 license for you to use! 

 

Contributors

• Nikolay Chunosov, known from his reZonator project [1], wrote the software.

• The n2-Photonics team tested the software in the lab and financially supported the project. 

 

Hardware

Currently, only IDS cameras supporting the IDS peak software (GenICam) are supported. The following cameras are tested:

• IDS U3-3680XCP-NIR Rev.1.2 (recommended max. beam diameter: 2.8 mm @ 1/e²) [2]

• IDS U3-3180CP Rev. 2.2 (recommended max. beam diameter: 3.9 mm @ 1/e²) [3]

 

Important Note

Commercial-grade beam profilers usually remove the cover glass on top of the sensor since it can introduce measurement artifacts (secondary reflections or interference fringes for coherent radiation [4]). We usually do not remove the protective glass from IDS cameras since the coherence length of our femtosecond pulses (<300 fs) is short enough to avoid artifacts. However, your experience may vary.

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Where to download

Beam Inspector can be downloaded here [5]

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Documentation

The manual and user notes are currently being prepared and will be added here on the same webpage.​​