Absolute interferometric test of cylindrical wavefront with a fiber optic

A method of absolute testing of a cylindrical wavefront is presented. The method is a merging of the random ball test method with the fiber optic reference test. The random ball test assumes a large number of interferograms of a good quality sphere with errors that are statistically distributed such that the average of the errors goes to zero. The fiber optic reference test utilizes a specially processed optical fiber to provide a high quality reference wave from an incident line focus from the cylindrical wave under test. A simulation and preliminary experiment results are presented which indicate that this method can significantly reduce the effects of fiber surface errors, yielding more accurate cylindrical wave measurements. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI. [DOI: 10.1117/1.OE.53.11.114104]