A common-path interferometer including integrated single-prism beam shaping

Abstract

In this work, a common-path interferometer including integrated single-prism beam shaping is presented. Both theoretical considerations and experimental results on single-prism shaping of elliptical and circular laser beams were performed. Based on a single-prism beam shaper, a common-path interferometer without any classical beam splitter device was assembled and characterised. It is shown that the presented setup provides well-evaluable interference patterns with a Michelson contrast of 0.42–0.45.