Share Email Print
cover

Proceedings Paper

Experimental results for absolute cylindrical wavefront testing
Format Member Price Non-Member Price
PDF $17.00 $21.00

Paper Abstract

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.

Paper Details

Date Published: 5 September 2014
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 9206, Advances in Metrology for X-Ray and EUV Optics V, 92060E (5 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2062320
Show Author Affiliations
Patrick J. Reardon, The Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville (United States)
Ayshah Alatawi, The Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville (United States)


Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9206:
Advances in Metrology for X-Ray and EUV Optics V
Lahsen Assoufid; Haruhiko Ohashi; Anand Krishna Asundi, Editor(s)

© SPIE. Terms of Use
Back to Top
PREMIUM CONTENT
Sign in to read the full article
Create a free SPIE account to get access to
premium articles and original research
Forgot your username?
close_icon_gray