LASER WAVEFRONT ANALYZER USING SLIDING REFERENCEnINTERFEROMETRY Volume I Design and Performance Analysis

摘要

This final report describes a preliminary design and detailed performance analysis of a laser wavefront analyzer system. The laser wavefront analyzer is a complete diagnostic system for measuring at high frame rate the two-dimensional optical phase and intensity distributions of a high-power laser beam. The complete system includes a high-power laser beam sampler, the diagnostic instrumentation, and a data recording, processing, and display system. The laser wavefront analyzer system is based on the new sliding reference interferometer concept developed and breadboarded during this program. This interferometer is a differential optical phase measurement instrument that is insensitive to the fluctuations in amplitude, polarization, and wavelength, which are characteristic of a high-power laser radiation. Furthermore, because the technique is a differential phase measurement method, the hardware is insensitive to the environmental disturbances that are normally a major problem with two-beam interferometers. Volume I of this report describes the general system design and its expected performance. Volume II contains more detailed analyses of the subsystems and their design. (Author)