Diamond-turned optics supply the experimenter with complex shapes that can be used in a variety of optical systems. The combination of such elements can lead to very compact and lightweight collimators. Such collimators can in principle have large input apertures and long equivalent focal lengths in small packaging envelopes. This is both important and desirable where laser performance in the farfield is concerned. Based on previous tests with diamond-turned collimators, the nature of the surface errors and degree of coherence of laser light are key items.1 It is the intent of this paper to compare the farfield beam divergence of a collimated laser beam measured with a diamond-tuned collimator to the farfield beam divergence measured with a high quality glass parabola.

Date Published: 15 August 1988
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 0888, Laser Beam Radiometry, (15 August 1988); doi: 10.1117/12.944237

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0888:
Laser Beam Radiometry
Aaron A. Sanders, Editor(s)