It is our pleasure to announce a new Visual C++ tutorial for interfacing DataRay Camera and Slit Scan Profilers using the DataRay OCX. The DataRay OCX is an ActiveX component that can be accessed from a variety of Windows based environments. It includes ActiveX controls that allow users to build an interface that is capable of sending and receiving data from the DataRay software. The OCX is automatically generated and registered with the Windows operating system upon installation of the standard DataRay software. Complete documentation of the DataRay OCX is available for reference. Before writing an interface using the DataRay OCX, we recommend that you learn to use your beam profiler in the standard DataRay software.

In this post we discuss how to set the right capture block in the DataRay software. Read on to learn more!

In this entry we present a new tutorial highlighting our support for interfacing MATLAB with our interfacing MATLAB with our beam profilers.

In this post, we discuss our major new software update, as well as provide a preview of the demos we'll be showing at CLEO Conference 2016

M² is a measurement that was originally designed to determine the quality of a real beam in comparison to a theoretically perfect fundamental mode Gaussian beam (Siegman 1990). Although many lasers are designed to output a fundamental mode Gaussian beam, imperfections and/or cavity design in the laser will often cause superimposed higher-order transverse modes. M² provides an excellent metric for determining the higher-order mode content. In his original paper introducing M², Siegman gives mathematical expressions for the theoretical value of M² based on the weighted content of the various modes in a beam. In this blog post, we will programmatically generate Gaussian beams with multi-mode content and then analyze the M² value of these artificial beams calculated by the DataRay software in order to confirm the accuracy of our algorithms.

As leaders in the laser beam profiling business, we have worked with M² for decades. In this blog post we discuss M², when to use it, and the way it is measured. M² is a very useful measurement for a certain subset of laser beams—those that are predominately Gaussian—and determines how tightly an actual laser beam can be focused in comparison to a theoretically perfect Gaussian beam. Sometimes, customers wish to use M² as a laser beam metric, even when it isn't the most appropriate metric to use for their application. Even if M² isn't the right diagnostic metric for your beam, we would love to work with you and design a custom metric to assess the quality of your beam.