General One laser head is required in most measurement systems, regardless of the number of measurement axes in the system. The wavelength of light from the laser head is used as the length standard for Agilent laser measurement systems. The laser head generates a coherent (all light waves in phase), collimated (all waves traveling parallel to one another), light beam consisting of two orthogonally polarized frequency components. To differentiate between the frequencies, the lower frequency is identified as f1 and the higher as f2. The difference between these two frequencies is the “Reference Frequency”, listed in Table5-1.