Automatic laser beam characterization of monolithic Nd:YAG nonplanar ring lasers

A detailed beam characterization of continuous-wave single-frequency Nd:YAG solid-state ring lasers at a wavelength of 1064 nm is presented. The power noise, frequency noise, beam pointing fluctuations, spatial beam quality, and other properties of eight lasers of the same model were measured with a compact diagnostic instrument based on an optical ring resonator. One of the eight lasers was automatically characterized over a period of 3.5 months to investigate the long-term behavior. The results show that these lasers are highly stable laser sources, that the variations between different samples are rather small, and that these lasers are ideally suited for high precision optical experiments.