Experimental results for absolute cylindrical wavefront testing

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.