Find Out Quickly or You’ll Burn The Wrong Thing Up

High Energy Lasers have very sophisticated means of getting a laser beam produced and propagating toward the desired target. Sometimes things get in the middle of the beam path and aren’t noticed!

As “beyond the beam director” High Energy Laser diagnostics tools, SemQuest products can help High Energy Laser systems users assess their systems beam profile. Below is a still frame and a video of a real-world test event in which the profile of a SemQuest target board increased test safety by providing the first warning something was wrong with the beam propagation path.

Notice how the example of the object in the beam path does not exhibit the desired gaussian shape. In the case of this example, something was located in the beam path between the laser’s collimator and the SemQuest target. Since the expectation of the shot was an unobstructed beam with a gaussian shape, SemQuest was able to help identify the unsafe situation and call “beam off” for the shot so that the propagation path could be examined for foreign objects. Once the issue was identified, the shot was reattempted with the much better unobstructed results on the right.

Just look at this infograpic of a U.S. Navy High Energy Laser Weapon System. It is complex with a lot of moving parts that can be difficult to diagnose.

SemQuest targets offer a quick and easy to use solution able to offer spot and beam profiles as shown above for qualitative analysis of laser quality. In additional to this qualitative information, quantitative measurement data is also available for key metrics like:

• Power on Target
• Peak Irradiance
• Beam Diameter
• and more…

Here’s an example of just one frame’s worth of data: