The giant laser device used in inertial confined fusion (ICF) experimental research is the largest optical engineering ever built by humans. It requires thousands of large-diameter optical components, especially for optical components with diagonal dimensions close to or exceeding 1 meter, which leads to the manufacturing is extremely difficult. Wavefront characteristics are one of the key parameters of meter-size optical components. Since different degrees of wavefront error are introduced during the material preparation, manufacturing and coating processes, it requires precise measurement and precise control throughout the manufacturing process. In this paper, the research work on key problems such as measurement accuracy, measurement aperture and measurement efficiency in the wavefront error detection of meter-size optical components is carried out and summarized.
Existing absolute measurement methods are difficult to avoid the replacement and rotation of the large aperture interferometer’s reference flat, and it is impossible to achieve in-situ absolute measurement on the basis of keeping the reference flat of the interferometer not rotating and replacing each other. In this paper, a test method based on oblique incidence is practically implemented in the interferometric measurement process, and an auxiliary rotating device for large aperture flat is designed. Three sets of wavefront data are achieved through cavity interference measurement with a Fizeau interferometer and one oblique incidence measurement. An iterative algorithm is applied to retrieve the absolute surface shape of the test flat. The absolute measurement experiment is carried out on the 600-mm aperture interferometer produced by Zygo. The experimental results show that the absolute surface error of the reference flat measured according to the proposed method is 2.0 nm (RMS), differing from the absolute measurement results based on the Zygo approach.
Phase step plate has the property of step function, and it can be used to measure the interferometer system transfer function (ITF), which is used to objectively evaluate interferometer spatial frequency response characteristics. The traditional fabrication method of step plate is lithographic exposure combined with reactive ion beam etching method, which is costive, and not suitable for fabricating large diameter step plate. In this paper, a new fabrication method of step plate based on blade-mask coating technology is proposed. A step plate of 100mm diameter and 103.5nm step height is successfully fabricated, and the surface roughness, homogeneity, steepness of the step plate are satisfied for measurement requirements. Furthermore, the coated step plate is used to measure the ITF compared with an etched step plate, and the measurement results of two plates differ by no more than 5%, which shows a good consistency. Thus, the reliability of coated step plate for ITF measurements is proved.
In this paper, a test method based on oblique incidence is practically implemented in the interferometric measurement process. Three sets of wavefront data are achieved through cavity interference measurement with a Fizeau interferometer and one oblique incidence measurement. An iterative algorithm is applied to retrieve the matrix of transmission flatness and reference flatness. The new method can not only calibrate the reference flat error of large aperture interferometer, but also provide the absolute measurement method for large rectangular optical components applied in high power laser systems.
A common way to test high-quality aspherical lenses is to use a measurement system based on a set of null corrector and
a laser interferometer. The null corrector can either be a combination of spherical lenses or be a computer generated
hologram (CGH), which compensates the aspheric wave-front being tested. However, the null optics can’t be repeatedly
used once the shape of tested optics changes. Alternative active null correctors have been proposed based on dynamic
phase modulator devices. A typical dynamic phase modulator is liquid crystal spatial light modulator (LCSLM), which
can spatially change the refractive index of the liquid crystal and thus modify the phase of the input wave-front. Even
though the measurement method based on LCSLM and laser interferometer has been proposed and demonstrated for
optical testing several years ago, it still can’t be used in the high quality measurement process due to its limited accuracy.
In this paper, we systematically study the factors such as LCSLM structure parameters, encoding error and laser
interferometer performance, which significantly affect the measurement accuracy. Some solutions will be proposed in
order to improve the measurement accuracy based on LCSLM and laser interferometer.
The multi-object broadband imaging echellette (MOBIE) is the seeing-limited, visible-wavelength imaging multi-object spectrograph (MOS) planned for first-light use on the thirty meter telescope (TMT). The current MOBIE optical design provides two color channels, spanning the 310nm–550nm and 550nm-1000nm passbands. The involved large optics includes an atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) prism (1.4m in diameter), a collimator (1.7mx1.0m), a dichroic(680 mm x500 mm x 30 mm), a red folding mirror and two corrector lenses(570mm in diameter) for different channels. In the past two years, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) has been included in the preliminary study of folding mirror sub-system in MOBIE, especially the study on the large optics manufacture techniques. The research progress of these large optics will be reviewed in this paper. The influence of optical quality of the large optics on the MOBIE is analyzed in order to define the specifications of the large optics. The manufacture methods are designed for different large optics. In order to testify the effectiveness of the manufacture methods, some samples have been processed and the final performance including wavefront error and spectral properties are tested. Finally, the future work including remaining problems and possible solutions are introduced.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.