Visual inspection of 3-D surface and refractive-index profiles of microscopic lenses using a single-arm off-axis holographic interferometer.

Abstract

A single-arm off-axis holographic interferometer (SA-OHI) system for visual inspection of the three-dimensional (3-D) surfaces and refractive-index profiles of micrometer-scale optical lenses is proposed. In this system, a couple of pellicle beam splitters and optical mirrors are employed to generate two sheared off-axis beams from the single object beam by controlling the tilted angle of the optical mirror. Each sheared beam is divided into two areas with and without object data, which are called half-object and half-reference beams, respectively. These sub-divided object and reference beams then make interference patterns, just like the conventional two-arm holographic interferometer. This holographic interferometer system, called SA-OHI, can solve the DC bias, virtual and duplicated image problems occurred in most lateral shearing interferometers, which allow extraction of the hologram data only related to the target object. The operational principle of the proposed system is analyzed based on ray-optics. To confirm the feasibility of the proposed system in the practical application fields, experiments with test lenses are also carried out and the results are comparatively discussed with those of the conventional system.