Abstract
The shearing interferometry is an alternative technique for assessment and measurement of wave-front aberrations. The vectorial shearing interferometer uses a displacement system to shear a wave front in vectorial form. We describe the wave-front displacement system incorporating a novel configuration of a pair of wedge prisms. Its main advantage is that the shearing is constant from the displacement system to image plane. The shear direction depends of the relative orientation of the prisms. The magnitude of the shearing is proportional to the distance between prisms. The proportionality constant depends of the wedge angle and the material of the prisms. This constant gives the sensibility to the displacement of the system. We describe and analyze the wave-front propagation through the displacement system using the exact ray trace. The deviation of the shearing by the difference in the wedge angles is larger than the produced by the oblique incidence of the wave front. Finally, we compare experimental results with exact ray trace simulations. We observe that the theoretical data corresponds to the experimental results. There is a maximum rms error of ≈ 10 μm.
Published Version
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