How to Read an Interferogram report?

Started by timmbottoni, 03/19/2009 12:54AM
Posted 03/19/2009 12:54AM Opening Post
I would like to know if anyone here can explain how to read a report like this one to us non-optical engineer folks.

http://geonik.homeip.net/home/tmp/tabid/135/Default.aspx

Thanks!

Timm
Posted 03/19/2009 01:55AM #1
I can tell you a few pieces of it...

1) The wavelength in nanometers tells you what frequency of light was used to perform the test. In the case of a reflector, this matters only because the errors are reported as a ratio of the wavelength of light, so to determine absolute error you need the wavelength. In the case of a refractor, you usually choose the frequency of light at which the optics have been "nulled." This is usually something closer to green--in the middle of the visual portion of the spectrum. Not certain why red would be used for a refractor.

2) The Peak to Valley error tells you, as a ratio to the wavelength of light tested, what the largest error on the lens is. Generally, I do not believe this is considered a very useful number since a lens with a relatively large PTV error can still perform very well if that error covers only a very small portion of the lens.

3) RMS error is a measure of the average error (RMS = root mean square or average magnitude). This is a very good indicator of the performance of the lens, but even this number can be somewhat inaccurate since you don't know how many points were sampled, or whether those points were truly accurate representations of the overall lens.

4) Strehl ratio tells you the percentage of light that is focused inside the Airy disk when compared with a perfect optic. In some cases it is "corrected" to account for the central obstruction as well (which tends to diffract light outside the Airy disk). If you want a single, easy to read number that tells you a lot about the performance of a lens or mirror, this is probably the one. For moderate RMS errors, there is a simple formula to convert from RMS wavefront error to Strehl, so the two should be nearly interchangeable. Most people are more comfortable with Strehl simply because it is a percentage of perfection.

5) Tilt and defocus are generally removed since they are not measurements of the optic itself, but of the overall system (including how the lens was mounted in the test equipment).

6) Astigmatism, spherical error, and coma should never be "removed"--if you see that one is missing, someone may well be playing games with the report to try and show an artificially high Strehl/RMS error. In this case they are properly reported (but you'd be surprised what people will occasionally stoop to).

I don't have the knowledge to accurately tell you how to read the synthetic interferogram or the wavefront map. I can say that straighter lines in the former are good, and that a flatter surface in the latter is good, but the subtleties of how much of a wiggle and where it is located affects the performance are beyond me. Perhaps others will chime in.

PSF stands for "Point Source Function" and tries to show you how a perfect point source--such as a star--would behave at high power. The map shows a synthetic diffraction pattern at high power, and the surface shows the variation in intensity of light across the diffraction pattern.

MTF or Modulation Transfer Function describes how a lens represents contrast between line pairs that are arrayed in either a sagittal (concentric rings) or tangential (rays going outward) pattern. On the vertical axis you see, approximately, the performance as a percentage of perfect contrast. On the horizontal axis you see the line pairs getting closer and closer together as you move from left to right. I have never found MTF curves for telescopes particularly useful since they show very little deviation from perfection. They are much more useful with photographic lenses where you can see differences in performance with focal length (for zoom lenses) and often show differences in performance across the imaging plane at various standardized line spacings. In those situations you can learn where a lens's sweet spot is--best focal lengths and the resulting corner sharpness.

O.K., that pretty well exhausts my knowledge of interferogram reports. The only question in my mind on this one is why red light was used, and how that would SKU the resulting performance. I don't know the answer to either of these.