An effective way to calibrate the external errors which are contributed in the interferometric test for spherical surfaces

Abstract

Optical metrology is a critical and complicated technique for the fabrication of precision optics which surface figure is better than RMS 1/30λ. The intrinsic systematic error of the experimental setup including the alignment error of the metrology tool and manufacturing error of the reference optics shall be calibrated carefully. Nevertheless, the measured consequence also includes the surface deformation caused by mounting supporter and gravity effect, which may result in a misleading judgment for surface figure correction, especially for mid- to-large optics. Besides the systematic error of experimental setup and deformation by an external condition of the optics, the environmental condition such as temperature drift, air turbulence, and vibration also affect the measured result. This paper proposes a method which adopts the magnitude and phase of each non-rotationally symmetrical Zernike coefficients grabbed from the multiple measurements from rotating the optics to analyze the absolute low-spatial frequency figures.