Beam alignment based on two-dimensional power spectral density of a near-field image.

Beam alignment is crucial to high-power laser facilities and is used to adjust the laser beams quickly and accurately to meet stringent requirements of pointing and centering. In this paper, a novel alignment method is presented, which employs data processing of the two-dimensional power spectral density (2D-PSD) for a near-field image and resolves the beam pointing error relative to the spatial filter pinhole directly. Combining this with a near-field fiducial mark, the operation of beam alignment is achieved. It is experimentally demonstrated that this scheme realizes a far-field alignment precision of approximately 3% of the pinhole size. This scheme adopts only one near-field camera to construct the alignment system, which provides a simple, efficient, and low-cost way to align lasers.