Suppressing the influence of charge-coupled device vertical blooming on the measurement of laser beam quality factor (M) of a near-infrared laser.

In this paper, a new method, which is based on reconstructing the original intensity distribution of a laser with images captured by a charge-coupled device (CCD) in two orthogonal directions, is proposed for suppressing the influence of CCD vertical blooming on the measurement of the laser beam quality factor (M). A simplified theoretical model for the distribution of CCD blooming is also proposed. With the proposed method and model, the influence of CCD vertical blooming on the measurement of M is simulated. The experimental results demonstrate that the new method can be an effective means to measure the M of a near-infrared laser with a silicon CCD camera. The proposed method can be applied to a beam quality analyzer in order to suppress the influence of blooming on the measurement of M.