As Koji pointed out in the previous elog, the CCD beam profiler was ill suited for this measurement. Nevertheless, to get a rough idea of the beam profile, I made a few rearrangements to my earlier setup:

• Kept the HWP at the same place it was, as this is roughly the configuration that is going to be used at the endtable anyways. It was ~7cm from the shutter housing on the laser head (unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture).
• Moved the PBS downstream till it was ~40 cm away (so as to minimize the thermal lensing effect from the ~300mW beam) from the laser head. Rotated the HWP till I got about 6mW of transmitted power (dumped the rest into a black hole)
• Installed a 95% reflecting BS to further attenuate the power to a level suitable for the CCD (dumped the reflected part onto a razor beam dump)
• Installed the CCD beam profiler and captured an image, at ~60cm from laser head. In this configuration, I was able to get a clean image capture without the CCD saturating. Unfortunately, I could not transfer it off the laptop used to operate the beam profiler, I will upload a screen capture tomorrow once I get it. Anyways, the main observation was that the beam appeared quite elliptical (ellipticity ~0.6). It was also not clear to what extent thermal lensing at the PBS/BS was afftecting this measurement.

Following Koji's suggestion, I decided to do a knife-edge measurement as well. The measurement configuration was similar to the one described above, except the PBS/BS were removed, and a 1.0 neutral density filter was was installed ~80cm from the laser head (here the ~300 mW beam was >2mm in diameter, as judged by eye). I used the Ophir power meter, which was why I had to install an ND filter as it is rated for 100mW max power. I will put a picture up tomorrow. Thermal lensing shouldn't be of much consequence here, as we just need the whole beam to fall onto the power meter active area (verified by eye), and only the relative change in power levels as the knife edge cuts the beam matters. I took the cross-sectional profile of the beam by translating the knife in the x-direction (i.e. cut the beam "left to right" ).

Attachments 1 and 2 are the results from todays measurements. It remains to repeat by cutting the beam along the y direction, and see what ellipticity (if any) shows up. I also found some "nominal" numbers in page 4 of the Lightwave datasheet - it tells us to expect a waist 5cm from the shutter housing, with horizontal and vertical 1/e^2 diameters of 0.5mm and 0.38mm respectively. My measurement suggests a horizontal diameter of ~0.25mm (half the "nominal" value?!), and the waist location to be 8.22cm from the shutter housing. I wonder if this discrepancy is a red flag? Could it be due to the HWP? I'm reasonably sure of my calculations, and the fits have come out pretty nicely as well...