Elementary experiments in green laser vibrometry

The main disadvantage of He-Ne based Doppler vibrometer is low efficiency and high power consumption of the laser. Many application require compact, high efficiency, single frequency and narrow linewidth laser sources with the output power at the level of tens of mW. These requirements are fulfilled quite well by microchip lasers. Narrow linewidth at the level of a few kHz, single frequency operation, precise frequency tuning, very good beam quality and high efficiency (-10%) of solid state single frequency green laser motivate us to use it as a laser source in LDV. In this paper, conception and practical realization of heterodyne laser vibrometry based on single frequency solid state microchip SHG laser operated at 532 nm is presented.