Accuracy of laser beam center and width calculation

The application of lasers in high-precision measurements and the demand for accuracy make a plane-wave model of laser beams unsatisfactory. Measurements of the variance of the transverse components of the photon impulse are essential for wavelength determination. Accuracy evaluation of the relevant calculations is thus an integral part of the assessment of the wavelength of stabilized-laser radiation. The article presents a propagation-of-error analysis on variance calculations when digitized intensity profiles are obtained by means of silicon video cameras. Image clipping criteria are obtained, which maximize the accuracy of the computed result.