I did a quick measurement of the beam size on the MC REFL PD today morning. I disabled the MC autolocker while this measurement was in progress. The measurement set up was as follows:

This way I was able to get right up to the heat sink - so this is approximately 2cm away from the active area of the PD. I could also measure the beam size in both the horizontal and vertical directions.
The measured and fitted data are:

The beam size is ~0.4mm in diameter, while the active area of the photodiode is 2mm in diameter according to the datasheet. So the beam is ~5x smaller than the active area of the PD. I couldn't find anything in the datasheet about what the damage threshold is in terms of incident optical power, but there is ~100mW on th MC REFL PD when the MC is unlocked, which corresponds to a peak intensity of ~1.7 W / mm^2...
Even though no optics were intentionally touched for this measurement, I quickly verified that the spot is centered on the MC REFL PD by looking at the DC output of the PD, and then re-enabled the autolocker. |