The tilted wave interferometer has been developed as a fast and accurate instrument for the measurement of aspheric and freeform surfaces. We present a method for increasing its robustness and flexibility. Tilted wave interferometry crucially depends on accurate calibration and any changes to a calibrated setup require, in general, a recalibration. Therefore, we propose a method for simultaneous topography reconstruction and elimination of errors arising from such changes. An approach to identify trends in systematic errors for the complex non-null setup with a large number of blackbox model parameters is worked out. The procedure allows deriving an error removal scheme for nonrotationally symmetric components based on measurements in different rotational positions. The feasibility and benefit of the error elimination method are shown both by simulation methods and dedicated experiments. A significant reduction of systematic errors even in a miscalibrated state is achieved. Hence, recalibrations are avoided and measurement time and flexibility are improved.
Recently, we have proposed an interferometric setup with a diffractive zoom-lens that includes two computer generated holograms for this purpose.1 Their surface phases are a combination of a cubic function for the adaption of aberrations and correction terms necessary to compensate substrate-induced errors. With this system based on Alvarez design a variable defocus and astigmatism controlled by a lateral shift of the second element is achieved.
One of the main challenges is the calibration of the system.
We use a black-box model2 recently introduced for a non-null test interferometer, the so called tilted wave interferometer3 (TWI). With it, the calibration data are calculated by solving an inverse problem. The system is divided in the two parts of illumination and imaging optics. By the solution of an inverse problem, we get a set of data, which describes separately the wavefronts of the illumination and imaging optics. The main difference to the TWI is the flexible diffractive element, which can be used in continuous positions. To combine the calibration data of a couple of positions with the exact placement, we designed alignment structures on the hologram. We will show the general functionality of this calibration and first simulation results.
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