Acoustic tomography of pulsed laser beams

The paper is concerned with the problem of determining energy density distribution over the cross section of a laser beam from pressure measurements in a divergent acoustic wave generated by a laser pulse in a weakly absorbing fluid or gas. It is shown that, in the general case, this problem can be solved by means of computational tomography, provided that the acoustic sources are located sufficiently far from the beam. Results of a numerical experiment are presented.