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Optical Alignment Using NanoScan

Measure down to 4µm with no attenuation optics

“I am very impressed at the performance and speed that these heads have. Integration with the NanoScan Software via ActiveX was also a pleasure.”

— Bryan Joles,
Symbol Technologies

NanoScan with Red Laser
Aligning optical assemblies is a critical operation for their manufacture. These assemblies are used in an extensive range of technical applications to deliver a laser beam of a certain size, quality, and intensity to a region of space. While different techniques and instruments are available for profiling laser beams, Photon's NanoScan scanning slit profiler can accommodate a wide variety of wavelengths, beam powers, and beam sizes. In many applications scanning slits eliminate the need for additional optics, such as lenses and attenuators. Attenuation optics can distort a laser's beam and add additional complexity into the measurement. They also preclude analysis of a beam at its focus because the attenuator increases the optical path length of the beam and may add aberrations. The NanoScan can typically measure down to 4 microns without the use of magnifying lenses.

Free-space optical components, as the name implies, are those components from which light beams are sent between optical components through free space as opposed to through waveguides or fibers. These can be either single or multiple beam devices. In any case, it is normally necessary align a lens to the source to collimate or focus the light beam. Examples of typical Photon customer applications for optical alignment include laser marking and printing, barcode scanners, fiber optic collimation, targeting optics, fiber laser manufacture and many others.

Photon customers find that they can save money, time, and resources using our NanoScan profilers to do their alignments.

Additional Information
See Photon Application Note: Attenuation-Induced Error due to Thermal Lensing in Beam Measurement. Beam size limitations are based on slit width. NanoScan heads are available with a variety of slit widths from 1µm to 25µm. Beams must be 4 times slit width for accurate measurement.