according to specifications and your best customers are waiting weeks for
delivery? Does the manufacturer send a field service engineer repeatedly to
check for problems? What happens when the manufacturer cannot tell you what
is wrong after they finally sent their corporate, factory-level engineers to
investigate? Do you demand a full refund if the laser still won't work properly and
weeks are passing by? What if you spent a fortune in acquisition, setup, training
and labor costs and you thought that you bought the best product available on the
market?
With increasingly sophisticated applications, the demands on the quality of the laser beam have become much greater. Traditional methods of measuring laser beam intensity profile; i.e., burn spots, mode burns, and viewing the reflected beam, are woefully inadequate for assuring the laser quality needed for today's applications. Indeed, lasers are becoming of increasingly high quality. To a large extent this is due to the availability of electronic beam profile instruments. These instruments provide a real time view of the laser beam profile that provides infinitely greater intuition to enable laser optimization. Also, electronic laser beam profilers produce much more accurate quantification of laser beam properties. The accuracy of these measurements enables scientists to fine tune the laser properties to a greater extent than previously possible. New algorithms for laser beam property quantification are discussed, along with the performance improvement of these calculations. In addition, examples are presented of actual situations in which viewing the laser beam has significantly improved its performance.