Thin air-spaced shear plate for testing laser beam collimation and measurement of divergence of laser beams

摘要

A thin air-spaced shear plate is devised for obtaining a lateral shear of fraction of a millimeter. The thin air-spaced shear plate is found to be useful for directly measuring the radius of curvatures of laser beam wave-fronts of commonly used lasers such as red and green He-Ne lasers and diode lasers, whose spot sizes are in the range of 2-5 mm.