The Laser Illuminator Tutorial is designed as an introduction to coherent aspects of FRED. Links are provided to the relevant Help pages as various topics are presented.

The tutorial is divided into three sections:

Basic - where users learn the fundamentals of constructing geometry by adding catalog lenses to form an afocal telescope, create a simple laser source, and perform analyses of the afocal.

Intermediate - where detailed aspects of coherent sources are introduced along with the tools needed to characterize their behavior. This section introduces the Gaussian Ray Size Spot Diagram, the Scalar Field calculation and a wavefront analysis. A configuration of the source and afocal which produces coherent ray errors will also be demonstrated. The Field Resampling feature is introduced as a method of circumventing this problem.

Advanced -  demonstrates implementation of the Field Resampling technique in FRED's scripting language, and optimizes the afocal performance for different locations of the laser beam waist.