Photorefractive Laser Ultrasound Spectroscopy for Materials Characterization

Ultrasonic elastic wave motion is often used to measure or characterize material properties. Through the years, many optical techniques have been developed for applications requiring noncontacting ultrasonic measurement. Most of these methods have similar sensitivities and are based on time domain processing using interferometry1. Wide bandwidth is typically employed to obtain real-time surface motion under transient conditions. However, some applications, such as structural analysis, are well served by measurements in the frequency domain that record the randomly or continuously excited vibrational resonant spectrum. A significant signal-to-noise ratio improvement is achieved by the reduced bandwidth of the measurement at the expense of measurement speed compared to the time domain methods. Complications often arise due to diffuse surfaces producing speckle that introduces an arbitrary phase component onto the optical wavefront to be recorded. Methods that correct for this effect are actively being investigated today.