• Korean Journal of Optics and Photonics
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.189-193
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• 1997

Aspheric pick-up lenses are increasingly used in consumer products such as computer and multimedia, as their mass production has become possible owing to the injection molding process. However still much work needs to be done for more effective manufacture of aspheric lenses, one area of which is the in-line inspection of produced lenses. In this paper, we present a lateral-shearing interferometer that has specially been designed to have a high immunity to external vibration and atmospheric disturbance. The interferometer comprises four prisms. They are directly attached to each other using an immersion oil so that relative sliding motions between the prisms are allowed. Their relative displacement can readily generate necessary lateral-shearing and phase-shifting to determine the wavefront of the beam collimated by the lens under inspection. A special phase-measuring algorithm of arbitrary-bucket is adopted to compensate the phase-shifting error caused by the thickness reduction in the immersion oil. Zernike polynomial fitting has done for determinating quantitative aberration of aspheric pick-up lenses. The interferometer built in this work is robust to external mechanical vibration and atmospheric disturbance so that experimental results show that it has a repeatability of less than λ/100.