Determination of laser beam focus position based on secondary speckles pattern analysis

Proper positioning of a laser beam focus is a universal problem for various applications that does not have a universal solution. Quite often the taken approach relies on some sort of a calibration and temporal stability of the laser and the optical train. While such an approach can be suitable for a large number of applications its applicability becomes limited in the cases where the laser beam properties uncontrollably change with time. The latter can occur due to the thermal effects, for example. In those cases, the laser focus positioning method should include direct analysis of the laser beam properties. In this contribution we present a simple optical method based on the secondary speckles pattern analysis suitable for determination of the absolute focal spot position. The method does not require any a priori knowledge of the laser beam properties and is suitable for various diffuse or partially diffuse surfaces of interest. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America