Photosensitive or thermally sensitive paper placed in a pulsed beam to capture its footprint in a single shot. The burn shows size, shape, clipping and hot spots and makes a simple alignment target that can be compared before and after a change. It is cheap and fast, but it smokes and spits debris, so it is kept away from optics, and the result is only a rough picture compared with a profiler.
Take a burn paper shot at the focus and at the output window, I want to see if the mode is clipped before the amp.
Also heard as
- zap paper
Related terms
IR card
A small card coated with phosphor that glows visibly where an invisible infrared beam hits it, used for alignment.
Hot spot
A small region of a beam with much higher intensity than the rest, a common cause of optic damage.
Beam profiler
An instrument, usually a camera or scanning slit, that measures a laser beam's intensity distribution and width.
Shot
A single laser pulse, especially from a high-energy or low-repetition-rate system.