A compact radial shearing interferometer with arandomly encoded cosinusoidal zone plate forwavefront measurements

A radial shearing interferometer (RSI) using a randomly encoded cosinusoidal zone plate (RECZP) to measure the wavefront is proposed. The RECZP has two foci, i.e., a virtual focus and a real focus, so its Fresnel diffractions contain only two beams. These two beams can be regarded as the extended beam and the contracted beam in the RSI, respectively. This RSI is composed of a RECZP and a charge-coupled device (CCD). The radial shearing rate is continuously adjustable by changing the distance between the CCD and RECZP, which is good for measurement sensitivity and dynamic range for different situation requirements. In the simulation experiment, we analyzed the influence of beam tilt error, distance error of zone plate and CCD, CCD camera nonlinearity, and noise on wavefront reconstruction results. We also analyzed the effects of different fabrication errors (randomly encoded principle error, sidewall angle error, depth error, and alignment error of amplitude zone plate and phase zone plate) on the diffraction intensity distributions, which determine the fabrication tolerance of the RECZP. Experimentally compared with a ZYGO interferometer, the RECZP-RSI optical system can get good results.