San Jose, CA, September 30, 2004--Photon a manufacturer of beam profiling optical test equipment, has annoumced a new tool for profiling high power industrial lasers, the High Power NanoScan. The device analyzes CO2 lasers up to a few kilowatts of power, as well as Nd:YAG and other commonly used industrial lasers up to a few hundreds of Watts power. Unlike previous instruments designed to measure high power beams, the High Power NanoScan can measure the beam at focus. Either continuous wave or pulsed beams at kilo Hertz repetition rates are profiled with this instrument.
The tool was developed in response to recent developments in material processing technology, in which innovations involving optics and higher quality lasers finesse the laser energy to machine parts. Beam profiling is especially important in these applications to align optics, ensure that the machining process is within design specifications, and verify laser quality.
"Our customers want a tool to measure the beam where it is actually doing the work," said Allen Cary, sales and marketing director. "Until now, industrial laser manufacturing processes have generally been done either by checking the parts being worked on for flaws, or by monitoring the unfocused beam and extrapolating the focused beam's performance. Sometimes the flaw is difficult to discover until some later manufacturing step, when further value has been added, increasing the scrap and rework expense. Monitoring the raw laser beam has the disadvantage of only checking the laser, not the actual delivery optics. It does not really tell you what is going on at the work piece."
The High Power NanoScan uses a pyroelectric detector for light wavelengths from ultraviolet to over 20 microns. It analyzes beams as small as 20 microns, or as large as 20 mm with the large aperture option. Critical beam parameters such as beam size, beam position, beam profile, beam stability, Gaussian fit, and M-squared are also generated.