The need for high-quality aspheres is rapidly growing, necessitating increased accuracy in their measurement. A reliable uncertainty assessment of asphere form measurement techniques is difficult due to their complexity. In order to explore the accuracy of current asphere form measurement techniques, an interlaboratory comparison was carried out in which four aspheres were measured by eight laboratories using tactile measurements, optical point measurements, and optical areal measurements. Altogether, 12 different devices were employed. The measurement results were analysed after subtracting the design topography and subsequently a best-fit sphere from the measurements. The surface reduced in this way was compared to a reference topography that was obtained by taking the pointwise median across the ensemble of reduced topographies on a Cartesian grid. The deviations of the reduced topographies from the reference topography were analysed in terms of several characteristics including peak-to-valley and root-mean-square deviations. Root-mean-square deviations of the reduced topographies from the reference topographies were found to be on the order of some tens of nanometres up to 89 nm, with most of the deviations being smaller than 20 nm. Our results give an indication of the accuracy that can currently be expected in form measurements of aspheres.
Recently, two new scanning deflectometric flatness reference (DFR) measurement systems were installed at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt. These instruments are aimed at measurements of the absolute flatness of optical surfaces with sub-nanometre uncertainties. System 1 is mainly designed for horizontal specimens with sizes up to 1 m and weights up to 120 kg. The other setup, i.e. system 2, is designed for vertical specimens. The two DFR systems use three different deflectometric procedures, which are based on scanning a pentaprism or the so-called double mirror unit (DMU) across the specimen. These 90° beam deflectors eliminate—to a great extent—residual guidance errors of the scanning stages, which is required to attain topography measurements with sub-nanometre uncertainty. The setups of the two new systems, the principles of the three different measurement modes, the alignment procedures, simulation results and first measurements are presented.
Tilted-wave interferometry is a promising measurement technique for the highly accurate measurement of aspheres and freeform surfaces. However, the interferometric fringe evaluation of the sub-apertures causes unknown patch offsets, which currently prevent this measurement technique from providing absolute measurements. Simple strategies, such as constructing differences of optical path length differences (OPDs) or ignoring the piston parameter, can diminish the accuracy resulting from the absolute form measurement. Additional information is needed instead; in this paper, the required accuracy of such information is explored in virtual experiments. Our simulation study reveals that, when one absolute OPD is known within a range of 500 nm, the accuracy of the final measurement result is significantly enhanced.
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