In the inter-satellite laser communication, the diffraction-limit wavefront is required. To test the wavefront, we have developed a Jamin double-shearing interferometer. The interferometer is consists of two Jamin plates to form lateral shearing and four wedge plates to divide the aperture. The laser beam to be test is incident on the first Jamin plate and gives rise to two beams. One is reflected from the front surface of the first Jamin plate, then passes two wedge plates and is reflected from the rear surface of the second Jamin plate. The other is reflected from the rear surface of the first Jamin plate, then passes other two wedge plates and is reflected from the front surface of the second Jamin plate. The two beams are recombined to form the interferogram. For the interferometer, simple phase-shifting method to improve the measurement accuracy of the wavefront by moving four wedge plates is proposed in this paper. When the wedge plates are moved along its surface or in the incidence direction of the interferometer, the optical path difference of two interferometric beams is changed to form phase shift. The added optical path difference introduced by the movement of wedge plates is liner function of displacement, thus the phase-shifting amount is easy to be control. Wedge plates can be moved in four steps with interval of quarter wavelength and the phase can be unwrapped using the four-step phase-shifting algorithm. In experiments, phase-shifting interferograms are obtained. The usefulness of the phase-shifting methods is verified.

Date Published: 14 September 2011
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8162, Free-Space and Atmospheric Laser Communications XI, 81620S (14 September 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.892661

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8162:
Free-Space and Atmospheric Laser Communications XI
Arun K. Majumdar; Christopher C. Davis, Editor(s)