Experimental demonstration of tomographic slit technique for measurement of arbitrary intensity profiles of light beams

We demonstrate experimentally an optical imaging method that makes use of a slit to collect tomographic projection data of arbitrarily shaped light beams; a tomographic backprojection algorithm is then used to reconstruct the intensity profiles of these beams. Two different implementations of the method are presented. In one, a single slit is scanned and rotated in front of the laser beam. In the other, the sides of a polygonal slit, which is linearly displaced in a x-y plane perpendicular to the beam, are used to collect the data. This latter version is more suitable than the other for adaptation at micrometer-size scale. A mathematical justification is given here for the superior performance against laser-power fluctuations of the tomographic slit technique compared with the better-known tomographic knife-edge technique.