As technology advances, there is increasing demand for higher quality optics with fewer aberrations. Aspheric optics meet these needs, but at present there are no practical commercial systems to test these lenses. This keeps the costs high and stifles the market. ASE Optics proposes to develop a non-contact metrology system capable of quantifying optical surfaces that cannot be measured using standard interferometric instruments. In 2006 we developed a technology known as scanning low-coherence dual-wavelength interferometry (SLCDI) to measure the transmitted wavefront of large hemispheric domes for the US Army. ASE will leverage this success to design a new non-contact metrology instrument capable of simultaneously measuring the internal and external surfaces of aspheric corrector optics. The successful completion of this project will yield a commercial metrology instrument for free-form optics that will have wide appeal to defense agencies as well as to the optics manufacturing industry as a whole.
Benefit: Our approach has the following unique capabilities: Simultaneously measures exterior surface, interior surface, and optical thickness; Can be incorporated into 0x81 guring/polishing machines without unblocking the optic; Uses IR probe illumination that easily penetrates ALON, PCA, sapphire, etc.; Requires no reference optic; Measures freeform optics of arbitrary size with sub-micron precision.
Keywords: conformal surface, conformal surface, low coherence interferometry, Optical Metrology, Asphere
