介绍了3种常用的测量横向激励的脉冲气体激光器流场特性的检测方法，即干涉法、纹影法和光线偏折法。利用上述测量方法实现了对一台CO2激光器脉冲放电后的扰动激波和声波的测量，得到了其形成发展过程和传播方向，获得了气体循环流动速度的一维分布。另外通过对比3种方法获得的实验结果分析了各种测量方法，其中干涉法适用于对放电区域大、密度波动较小的激光器进行流场检测；纹影法更适用于对放电区域较窄、密度梯度较大的激光器进行流场检测；光线偏折法有更高的灵敏度，能够对微小扰动进行检测，并能获得每一个脉冲放电发生后的实时流场变化信息。

Experimental investigations to acquire the flow-field information of a transversely excited atmospheric (TEA) CO2 laser with three kinds of methods, including interferometer, schlieren and laser schlieren (LS) method, have been demonstrated. The development and the propagation of the shock waves and acoustic waves are obtained. Also the gas velocity distribution in the pulsed excitation direction is calculated by tracing the drift of the heated gas. The results show that interferometer is useful to measure the flow-field information in gas laser with low gas density gradient formed after discharge. The schlieren method is more suitable to be applied in gas laser with narrow discharge region and high gas density gradient. Simply-equipped single-filament schlieren method is more sensitive for tiny perturbation measurement and it can be used to acquire real-time information of the flow-field.