High precision interferometric measurement of freeform surfaces from the well-defined sub--aperture surface profiles

Abstract

We report an interferometric method for smooth freeform optics from the amount of sub-aperture surface profiles. The overall experimental system is composed of a 5-axis precision stage and a sub-aperture measuring interferometer, which is carefully calibrated to achieve 2 nmRMS precision. The sub-aperture interferometer adopts a broadband source in order to maximize the reliability of profile measurement, and a preliminary assumption of the overall surface is derived from the measured local 2nd derivatives which is robust to tip/tilt alignment errors during the sub-aperture acquisition. The optical surface of a 200 mm diameter 2D polynomial freeform mirror is measured based on this system and traditional contact surface profiler for the cross-validation. The experiment shows the effectiveness of the system that the mismatch against a commercial interferometer is less than 20 nmRMS.