Laser beam quality and pointing measurement with an optical resonator

We present a compact diagnostic breadboard that is based on an optical ring resonator for measuring beam quality and pointing of single-frequency continuous wave lasers at a wavelength of 1064 nm. To determine the beam quality of the coherent test beam, this optical resonator is used to perform a mode decomposition into Hermite-Gaussian modes. For our laser system, a power fraction in the fundamental Gaussian mode of 97.2%+/- 0.2% was measured. Residual misalignment and mis-mode-matching to the resonator as well as the astigmatism and/or ellipticity of the test beam have been determined. Numerical simulations showed that measurements of the M-2 factor and transversal intensity distribution are not suitable for determining this power fraction. To measure the beam pointing, the fundamental mode of the optical resonator was used as a stable reference. The pointing of the test beam was measured with the differential wave front sensing technique up to Fourier frequencies of 1 kHz with a sensitivity to relative pointing of parallel to epsilon parallel to= 1 x 10(-6)/root Hz. Pointing measurements with an alternative method were performed and showed good agreement. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.