Published Papers
Chapter 16 – Footnote for Chapters 14 and 15
This brief chapter serves as a vital addendum to the last two chapters. While I’ve already described the alignment process, I realized I hadn’t emphasized how remarkably simple it is—and what makes it so effortless. Over the years, countless methods have been used to align optics successfully, long before Bessel beams entered the picture. What […]
Chapter 15: Tabletop Alignment Part 2
In Chapter 14, we showed how to determine the axis of a laser beam to which we want to align optical elements and then how to align a Bessel beam to the laser beam axis. This Chapter shows the steps to align optical elements to the reference Bessel beam. With tabletop alignment, you have all […]
Chapter 14: Tabletop Alignment Part 1
At last, I am back to writing more about optical alignment. The hiatus was due to my realization that most readers are not interested in assembling lenses in a tube. Rather, they want to align free-standing optics on tabletops or benches in labs researching topics like laser light interactions with matter, free-space communication, and quantum […]
Chapter 13: New Optical Alignment Tools
In Chapter 12, I commented again on classical optical instruments since there was interest in an earlier discussion. This got me thinking about what had changed in optical technology since the period ending about 1950 when there was a rather canonical set of classical optical metrology tools. There has been a huge technological change since […]
Chapter 12: Further Comments on Classical Optical Instruments
There was more interest in Chapter 3 about the classical instruments used for optical alignment than any other chapter to date, and I didn’t have a chance to say all I wanted to, so I will continue the discussion in this Chapter to emphasize how changes in technology have changed the design of these instruments. […]
Determination of the unique optical axis of assembled lens systems
Measuring the quality of alignment of an assembled compound lens is often necessary. This raises the question of what
axis to use as a reference axis for this measurement. We suggest that the reference axis should be the optical axis of the
assembled system and that this axis is unique for each assembly.
Recent Posts
- Ritchey-Common Test & Similar Methods Using AI Image Space Phase Retrieval
- Chapter 23 Alignment of Convex Surfaces
- Chapter 22 – Simulation of the alignment of a Cooke triplet using a Bessel beam reference
- Chapter 21 – Bessel Beam Alignment of a Single Lense
- Chapter 20: Aligning Off-Axis Parabolas with a Bessel Beam — It’s Much Easier