With continued advances in cylindrical optics manufacturing capability, interferometric testing of such optics is difficult.
This is due to the lack of a well characterized cylindrical reference surface. In this paper, the Random Fiber Test (RFT)
is used to experimentally quantify the quality of fiber surface as a cylindrical reference. The basic idea of the experiment
is to take measurements at different rotations about, and translations along the fiber axis. From these measurements the
quality of the fiber surface in both directions can be determined.
A method of absolute testing of a cylindrical wavefront is presented. The method is a merging of the random ball test method with the fiber optic reference test. The random ball test assumes a large number of interferograms of a good quality sphere with errors that are statistically distributed such that the average of the errors goes to zero. The fiber optic reference test utilizes a specially processed optical fiber to provide a high quality reference wave from an incident line focus from the cylindrical wave under test. A simulation and preliminary experiment results are presented which indicate that this method can significantly reduce the effects of fiber surface errors, yielding more accurate cylindrical wave measurements.
Applications for Cylindrical and near-cylindrical surfaces are ever-increasing. However, fabrication of high quality
cylindrical surfaces is limited by the difficulty of accurate and affordable metrology. Absolute testing of such surfaces
represents a challenge to the optical testing community as cylindrical reference wavefronts are difficult to produce. In
this paper, preliminary results for a new method of absolute testing of cylindrical wavefronts are presented. The method
is based on the merging of the random ball test method with the fiber optic reference test. The random ball test assumes a
large number of interferograms of a good quality sphere with errors that are statistically distributed such that the average
of the errors goes to zero. The fiber optic reference test utilizes a specially processed optical fiber to provide a clean
high quality reference wave from an incident line focus from the cylindrical wave under test. By taking measurements at
different rotation and translations of the fiber, an analogous procedure can be employed to determine the quality of the
converging cylindrical wavefront with high accuracy. This paper presents and discusses the results of recent tests of this
method using a null optic formed by a COTS cylindrical lens and a free-form polished corrector element.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.