Abstract:
The novel highenergy laser weapons have been studies and developed for more than forty years. The first generation highenergy laser weapons mainly employ chemical CW lasers with excellent engineering scaling and good beam quailty. The second generation highenergy laser weapons mainly use solidstate lasers with shorter wavelength and different working mode to reach the lethal and damage effect with minimal output energy. With the development and deployment of highenergy laser weapon, it is very necessary for optical metrology and measurement of the highenergy laser weapon, it is very necessary for optical metrology and measurement of the highenergy laser parameters (such as energy/power, laser waveform, beam quality, near field and field intensity distributions, beam pointing stability, spectrum and polarization feature) to be done. In this paper, the present state and development trend for the novel highenergy laser weapons are reviewed. It is a great challenge for optical metrology test of the highenergy laser to meet the requirement of the research and development of the highenergy laser to meet the requirement of the research and development of highenergy laser weapon systems.