English

Simple precision measurements of optical beam sizes

Instrumentation and Detectors 2019-06-11 v1 Optics

Abstract

We present a simple precision-method to quickly and accurately measure the diameters of Gaussian beams, Airy spots, and central peak of Bessel beams ranging from the sub-millimeter to many centimeters without specialized equipment. Simply moving a wire through the beam and recording the relative losses using an optical power meter, one can easily measure the beam diameters with a precision of 1%. The accuracy of this method has been experimentally verified for Gaussian beams down to the limit of a commercial slit-based beam profiler (3%).

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.04153,
  title  = {Simple precision measurements of optical beam sizes},
  author = {Mikis Mylonakis and Saurabh Pandey and Kostas G. Mavrakis and Giannis Drougakis and Georgios Vasilakis and Dimitris G. Papazoglou and Wolf von Klitzing},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.04153},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:49:13.158Z