Wide-aperture no-moving-parts optical beam profiler using liquid-crystal displays

To the best of our knowledge, we demonstrate the first no-moving-parts largest aperture profiler design that is also cost effective. Specifically exploited is the large-scale production of thin-film transistor liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) to produce a high intrinsic reliability low-cost profiler. Today, the maximum beam diameter under test can reach 70 cm using 117 cm diagonal LCDs. Experiments conducted with the laboratory LCD profiler include 1D and 2D knife-edge profiling, 2D pinhole profiling, and beam divergence measurements.