Spatial filter
Revision as of 13:44, 26 May 2011 by Cmditradmin (talk | contribs)
A laser beam is by definition coherent with respect to longitudinal wavelengths which is determined by the length of the cavity. But coherent light can also exhibit transverse modes. A cross section of laser beam might exhibit a combination of various modes creating an uneven intensity. The spatial filter is a device such as a pinhole used to eliminate transverse modes.
A pinhole selects for the central TEM0 mode and blocks all the others.
The result is a clean gaussian distribution of beam power across the cross section.
see [wikipedia.org:Gaussian_beam}