Diffractive optical components for high power laser beam sampling

We investigate the use of low frequency diffraction gratings to extract good quality, low power copies of a high power laser beam. Low frequency gratings are expected to be rugged and to produce few perturbations of the beam under measurement. In order to obtain beam samplers that allow an easy integration in the beam delivery of high power industrial lasers we designed and constructed them as reflective components. In this work we report experimental tests that characterize their performance in the measure of beam parameters such as beam size, waist location and divergence.