Applications
Laser Measurement in Medical Laser Service
By Dan Little, Technical Director, Laser Training Institute, Professional Medical Education Association, Inc.

The global medical industry incorporates thousands of lasers into its arsenal of treatment tools. Wavelengths from UV to Far-Infrared are used for everything from Lasik eye surgery to cosmetic skin resurfacing. Visible wavelengths are used in dermatology and ophthalmology to target selective complementary color chromophores. Laser powers and energies are delivered through a wide range of fiber diameters, articulated arms, focusing handpieces, scanners, micromanipulators, and more. With all these variables, medical laser service personnel are faced with multiple measurement obstacles.
Uneven Laser Heating Causes Parts to Fail Inspection
By Chuck Reagan, Southeast Sales Manager, Ophir-Spiricon Inc.

What happens when your company's new laser fails to perform 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 send 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?
You Just Bought a New Laser. What Beam Shape Did You Get?

Problem: What happens when your company's new laser fails to perform
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?
Competitiveness, Optimization, and Compliance in Industrial Laser Applications
By Simon L. Engel, President, HDE Technologies, Inc., and Technical Director, Laser Welding Certification Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison

The business objectives in the title of this article are standard in all types of manufacturing, and laser-assisted fabrication is no exception. A set of tools has become available in the past few years that allows end users of industrial lasers to optimize the laser process while complying with current ISO and AWS technical standards. This helps manufacturers remain competitive in the US and in the global markets.
Beam Shaping for Space-Based Atmospheric Measurements
By Larry Green Etienne Friedrich

The EarthCARE (Earth Clouds, Aerosols and Radiation Explorer) mission is a joint European-Japanese mission addressing the need for a better understanding of the interactions between cloud, radiative and aerosol processes that play a role in climate regulation. Enzo Nava, Head of the Electro-optics Section at CESI, reports. “We had to produce a pre-development model for the Atmospheric LIDAR (ATLID) laser transmitter to operate. In this case, we were developing an end-pumped Nd:YAG MOPA laser system with frequency tripling to operate at 355 nm.
Beam Profiling in a Job Shop: Industrial CO2 Pulsed Laser

Producing acrylic mode burns is a laborious process that produces toxic fumes and, at best, rough approximations of beam shape and size. In some cases, they simply don't work, missing important beam details. Electronic beam profiling is an easy and cost-effective option. This article shows the differences between the two processes.
Why Do I Need Laser Beam Diagnostics?

Reason #1 To Save Money!

Reason #2 For More Accurate and Reliable Laser Research

Reason #3 For Better Laser Design

So why Spiricon's LBA-100A instead of one of those other guys?

What Is The Value Of Beam Diagnostics?

Industrial Applications Of Seeing The Laser Beam 

One of Spiricon's sales representatives recently gave a demonstration of the LBA-100A Advanced Laser Beam Analyzer on an industrial YAG laser. The customer has 10 YAG lasers for cutting and welding. They were getting unacceptable variations in the quality of the trim from two of the machines, and wanted to see if the LBA-100A would help them quantify their beam quality. Following is his report on the demonstration:

"We measured the beam after the point of focus, as it diverges, to an approximate diameter of 1/4". This gave us excellent results. On one laser giving problems we could see a near Gaussian distribution with a clip etch on one side. Even though the beam appeared uniform to them under viewing of an IR viewer, and burn paper showed nearly round patterns, it was obvious with the LBA-100A that there were problems. On a second laser system where they were seeing good cuts, we saw a perfectly uniform, near Gaussian beam".

What Is It And Why Do I Care?

Most laser engineers and scientists are familiar with beam width, position, divergence angle, Gaussian fit, and such parameters for characterizing a laser beam. M2 enables a user to quantitatively evaluate the focusability of the laser beam. It is a measure of how close an actual beam is to a perfect Gaussian single mode beam and is very easy to use in predicting the focused spot properties.

Maximizing Laser Accuracy with Laser Beam Analysis

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.

Finding the Angle of a 2-D Distribution
T. Troy Stark, Ophir-Spiricon, LLC

Who Needs M2
OLE, October 2006

Laser processing puts increasing demands on beam quality for the process to be cost-competitive. Merely profiling the beam and comparing the profile to a Gaussian fit is no longer adequate, because it does not guarantee a diffraction-limited beam. A 'Gaussian fit' calculation can deceive the user into assuming propagation properties that will not exist in practice. Thus, the Gaussian fit method can lull the user into a false sense of security of laser performance.

What measurement does provide this information? The Answer is the "Beam Propagation Factor" M2, which quantitatively compares the propagation characteristics of the actual beam to those of a pure TEM0,0 Gaussian beam.