Applicant:
Prof. Dr. Nabeel Riza, College of Optics & Photonics, University of Central Florida and Nuonics, Inc.

Abstract:
"Philosophy: Advances in laser technology have to go hand-in-hand with equivalent advances in laser beam testing and measurement technology." For the first time in the world, demonstrated and under commercial development is a novel hybrid analog-digital laser beam profiler (US Patent 6,922,233) based on analog fine motion of a Digital Micro-Mirror Device (DMD™) and within-chip all-digital control of near 1 million micro-mirrors acting as software programmable 100% reliable pin-holes. This powerful DMD-based profiler can operate with high power Watt level laser beams in the UV, visible, and near infrared bands in addition to providing both sub-micron level high resolution and wide area profiling coverage. Furthermore, the profiler can provide true fault-tolerant measurements even when the laser beam power is fluctuating during measurements. These amazing capabilities are highly limited and many cases not possible when using the expensive (e.g., > US $15,000) and bulky top-of-the-line state-of-the-art profilers. The expected profiler will cost under US $ 5000 and will usher in the age of wide spread beam profiler usage to allow the design and implementation of next generation super precision optical systems. A no-moving parts version of the all-digital profiler has also been demonstrated using Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) technology, making to our knowledge, the world’s largest beam aperture (e.g., 15 cm diameter) no-moving parts laser beam profiler (in Applied Optics 2007). The LCD-based profiler design can lead to very low cost (e.g., < $1000) 100% reliability beam profilers that is not possible today, and this LCD-based profiler is presently under development. See "Taking Advantage of the Digital Realm: A Paradigm Shift in Laser Beam Profiling Technology," N. A. Riza, Laser Focus World Magazine, August 2004.