Variable sensitivity of vectorial shearing interferometer

Abstract

A vectorial shearing interferometer with variable sensitivity based in the rotation of a pair of wedge prisms is discussed. The prism rotations incorporates differential and extended wavefront controlled displacements, combining the advantages of high sensitivity of conventional interferometers and low sensitivity of traditional shearing interferometers. The vectorial shearing interferometer allows the optimization of the measurement parameters for wave reconstruction algorithms. The reliable directional sensitivity of this interferometer has been experimentally demonstrated in spherical and aspherical surfaces. We also show the regularization technique to estimating the wavefront shearing interferometric patterns generated in vectorial shearing interferometry.