Study of a dual-frequency laser interferometer with unique optical subdivision techniques

A dual-frequency laser interferometer has been developed based on a low-performance commercial interferometer. An optical resolution of 1.24 nm and a nanometer-scale accuracy have been achieved by using unique techniques to obtain an optical subdivision factor of 1/8. A method for reducing static positioning errors was also shown. The measurement of a free-falling body was performed to test the maximum achievable target velocity of the device. The experimental setup for measuring the static positioning errors was also given. The new interferometer could be widely used in nanometer-scale fabrications and measurements.     

H－S法波前探测的高速图象采集系统

自适应光学系统中有两种方法用于测定波前的局部斜率：剪切干涉测量法和哈特曼法（以下简称Ｈ－Ｓ法）。由于Ｈ－Ｓ法运用较简单的光学系统，无需任何活动组件，具有较高的光效率，并能很好地用于探测器阵列，因此它更普遍地用于自适应光学系统中。本文介绍了一种应用于Ｈ－Ｓ法波前探测的高速图象采集系统，提出了应用本图象采集系统解决高帧频探测器阵列与数据处理机之间的同步协调的方法。     

Reflective grating interferometer: a folded reversal wave-front interferometer

We present a new, folded reversal interferometer. It is based on the reflective grating interferometer and can be applied for optical isolation and testing of coma aberration. The interferometer has several advantages in respect to other existing optical reversal configurations. A carrier can be easily added for phase retrieval in interferometric fringe patterns for mapping coma aberration. Furthermore, in an asymmetric optical configuration a lateral shear can also be added, transforming it in a reversal shearing interferometer. The principle of operation of the interferometer is described, and the application for measuring the coma aberration of a parabolic mirror used off axis is demonstrated.     

Multiplexed interferometric fiber-optic sensors with digital signal processing

A microcontroller-based digital signal processing system developed for use with fiber-optic sensors for measuring pressure in internal combustion engines is described. A single distributed feedback laser source provides optical power for four interferometric sensors. The laser current is repetitively modulated so that its optical frequency is nearly a linear function of time over most of a cycle. The interferometer phase shift is proportional to the elapsed time from the initiation of a sawtooth until the sensor output signal level crosses a threshold value proportional to the laser output power. This elapsed time, assumed to vary linearly with the combustion chamber pressure, is determined by the use of a digital timer-counter. The system has been used with fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer transducers for in-cylinder pressure measurement on a four-cylinder gasoline-powered engine.     

A new refractometer by combining a variable length vacuum cell anda double-pass Michelson interferometer

A new refractometer with a variable length vacuum cell has been developed to eliminate errors caused by deformations in optical windows of the cell. The refractive index of air is determined by measuring the changes in the optical path difference between the air of interest and a vacuum as a function of the changes in the cell length. An optical phase modulation technique and a dark fringe detection method are used to obtain a high resolution in measuring the optical path difference by a double-pass Michelson interferometer. A combined standard uncertainty of 5×10^-9 in the measurement of the refractive index of air has been achieved     

Optical Fourier processor and point-diffraction interferometer for moving-object trajectory estimation

A hybrid optical-digital signal processing system that estimates the trajectory of moving targets in a two-dimensional field at video frame rates was developed and constructed. The hybrid system is particularly well suited to the trajectory estimation of small, barely discernable, moving objects of unknown position and velocity in high-resolution image sequences. The system uses an optical Fourier processor and a point-diffraction interferometer to calculate the frequency-domain representation of moving objects from which their trajectory is estimated by use of conventional electronic processing techniques. In a series of experiments, target velocities were estimated to within 4% of their actual value and direction was estimated to within 3 deg.     

Image identification system based on an optical broadcast neural network processor

We describe the implementation of a vision system based on a hardware neural processor. The architecture of the neural network processor has been designed to exploit the computational characteristics of electronics and the communication characteristics of optics in an optimal manner, thus it is based on an optical broadcast of input signals to a dense array of processing elements. The vision system has been built by use of a prototype implementation of a neural network processor with discrete optic and optoelectronic devices. It has been adapted to work as a Hamming classifier of the images taken with a 128 x 128 complementary metal-oxide semiconductor image sensor. Its results, performance characteristics of the image classification system, and an analysis of its scalability in size and speed, with the improvement of the optoelectronic neural processor, are presented.     

Development of a Laser Interferometric Dilatometer for Measurements of Thermal Expansion of Solids in the Temperature Range 300 to 1300 K

A laser interferometric dilatometer has been developed for measuring linear thermal expansion coefficients of reference materials for thermal expansion in the temperature range 300 to 1300 K. The dilatometer is based on an optical heterodyne interferometer capable of measuring length change with an uncertainty of 0.6 nm. Linear thermal expansion coefficients of silicon were measured in the temperature range 700 to 1100 K. The performance of the present dilatometer was tested by a comparison between the present data and the data measured with the previous version of the present dilatometer and the data recommended by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA). The present data agree well with the recommended values over all the temperature range measured. On the other hand, the present values at lower temperatures are in poor agreement with the previous experimental data. The combined standard uncertainty in the present value at 900 K is estimated to be 1.1×10^–8 K^–1.     

Active contour segmentation by use of a multichannel incoherent optical correlator

We describe an optoelectronic incoherent multichannel processor that is able to segment an object in a real image. The process is based on an active contour algorithm that has been transposed to optical signal processing to accelerate image processing. This implementation requires exact-valued correlations and thus opens attractive perspectives in terms of optical analog computation. Furthermore, this optical multichannel processor setup encourages incoherent processing with high-resolution images.     

Experimental study of surface deformation and flow pattern on buoyant-thermocapillary convection

Free surface deformation is one of the most important physical phenomena in fluids with free surface. In the present paper, convection and surface deformation caused by thermocapillary effect in a rectangular cavity were investigated. In ground experiments, the convection was also affected by gravity. The cavity has a horizontal cross section of 52mm×42mm and the thikkness of the liquid layer is 4mm. Temperature difference between two sides of the liquid layer was increased gradually, and the flow in liquid layer will develop from steady to unstable convection. An optical diagnostic system consisting of a revised Michelson interferometer with image processor was developed to study fluid surface deformation in convection, and the displacements of free surface oscillation were determined. PIV technique was adopted to observe the evolution of flow pattern, and the velocity fields were obtained quantitatively. The present experiments demonstrate that surface deformation is quite distinct in buoyant-thermocapillary convection. in order to understand the mechanism of buoyant-thermocapillary convection, not only the hydrothermal wave instability but also the surface wave instability should be discussed.     

第三代激光干涉仪

微片激光自混合干涉仪原理上与迈克尔荪干涉仪不同。主要差别是：激光自混合干涉仪的光束照射在被测物上并被反射回激光器被激光器内放大介质放大。作者课题组研究的的激光自混合干涉仪的测量速度达到了1 m/s以上,10 m空程的环境误差小到了40 nm。它具有全固态,可测“黑”目标的位移等性能,又达到了传统激光干涉仪的技术指标。如果第一代光学干涉仪是以光谱灯做光源,第二代光学干涉仪是以HeNe气体激光器做光源的话,固体激光自混合干涉仪因其激光“自混合”原理可看成是第三代激光干涉仪。     

Laser interferometer for measuring strains of a rotating platform

The optical system of a laser interferometer for measuring the linear and angle strains of a high-precision rotating platform is described. The laser interferometer can be used to determine the spatial orientation of an accelerometer mount and to increase the accuracy of the certification. The effect of the aberrations of the optical system elements on the results of the measurements has been analyzed. Translated from Izmeritel'naya Tekhnika, No. 10, pp. 35–38, October, 1996.     

Inspection of commercial optical devices for data storage using a three Gaussian beam microscope interferometer

Recently, an interferometric profilometer based on the heterodyning of three Gaussian beams has been reported. This microscope interferometer, called a three Gaussian beam interferometer, has been used to profile high quality optical surfaces that exhibit constant reflectivity with high vertical resolution and lateral resolution near lambda. We report the use of this interferometer to measure the profiles of two commercially available optical surfaces for data storage, namely, the compact disk (CD-R) and the digital versatile disk (DVD-R). We include experimental results from a one-dimensional radial scan of these devices without data marks. The measurements are taken by placing the devices with the polycarbonate surface facing the probe beam of the interferometer. This microscope interferometer is unique when compared with other optical measuring instruments because it uses narrowband detection, filters out undesirable noisy signals, and because the amplitude of the output voltage signal is basically proportional to the local vertical height of the surface under test, thus detecting with high sensitivity. We show that the resulting profiles, measured with this interferometer across the polycarbonate layer, provide valuable information about the track profiles, making this interferometer a suitable tool for quality control of surface storage devices.     

Experiments with active phase matching of parallel-amplified Multiline HF laser beams by a phase-locked Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Active phase matching of multiline HF laser beams by means of a phase-locked Mach-Zehnder interferometer was demonstrated by locking the interferometer to the central interference fringe at zero optical path length difference. The central fringe could be found by varying the spectral content of the input beam. Laser amplification in one leg of the interferometer decreased fringe visibility without adversely affecting locking. Single-line fringe patterns produced by an array spectrometer (while the interferometer was operated in its scanning mode) were analyzed to show that no significant dispersion occurred in the amplifier. The techniques developed have potential for measuring dispersion mismatch between larger parallel amplifiers. These experiments demonstrated in principle that a number of multiline HF amplified beams can be recombined and phase-matched to produce a high beam quality output beam.     

Optical imaging of inhomogeneous magnetic fields through the deformation of paramagnetic liquid films

A new quantitative method for optical imaging of inhomogeneous weak magnetic fields has been developed, using a thin paramagnetic liquid film on a surface in the region of the magnetic field. The deformation of the paramagnetic liquid film reveals the magnetic field distribution. The measurements were made interferometrically using a version of the Michelson interferometer through which an image could be observed. The expected theoretical behavior was developed, and the method was investigated experimentally using two different liquids in two temperature regions.     

Simulation method for interference fringe patterns in measuring gear tooth flanks by laser interferometry

We present a ray-tracing-based method for simulation of interference fringe patterns (IFPs) for measuring gear tooth flanks with a two-path interferometer. This simulation method involves two steps. In the first step, the profile of an IFP is achieved by means of ray tracing within the object path of the interferometer. In the second step, the profile of an IFP is filled with interference fringes, according to a set of functions from an optical path length to a fringe gray level. To examine the correctness of this simulation method, simulations are performed for two spur involute gears, and the simulated IFPs are verified by experiments using the actual two-path interferometer built on an optical platform.     

Real-time three-dimensional object recognition with multiple perspectives imaging

A novel system for recognizing three-dimensional (3D) objects by use of multiple perspectives imaging is proposed. A 3D object under incoherent illumination is projected into an array of two-dimensional (2D) elemental images by use of a microlens array. Each elemental 2D image corresponds to a different perspective of the 3D object. Multiple perspectives imaging based on integral photography has been used for 3D display. In this way, the whole set of 2D elemental images records 3D information about the input object. After an optical incoherent-to-coherent conversion, an optical processor is employed to perform the correlation between the input and the reference 3D objects. Use of micro-optics allows us to process the 3D information in real time and with a compact optical system. To the best of our knowledge this 3D processor is the first to apply the principle of integral photography to 3D image recognition. We present experimental results obtained with both a digital and an optical implementation of the system. We also show that the system can recognize a slightly out-of-plane rotated 3D object.     

Interferometric optical fourier-transform processor for calculation of selected spatial frequencies

A novel interferometric optical Fourier-transform processor is presented that calculates the complex-valued Fourier transform of an image at preselected points on the spatial-frequency plane. The Fourier spectrum of an arbitrary input image is interfered with that of a reference image in a common-path interferometer. Both the real and the imaginary parts of the complex-valued spectrum are determined. The source and the reference images are easily matched to guarantee good fringe visibility. At least six interferograms are postprocessed to extract the real and the imaginary parts of the Fourier spectrum at preselected points. The proposed hybrid optical-digital technique is computationally appropriate when the number of desired spatial frequencies is small compared with the number of pixels in the image. When the number of desired points is comparable with the number of image pixels, a conventional or pruned two-dimensional fast Fourier transform is more appropriate. The number of digital operations required by the hybrid optical-digital Fourier processor is proportional to the number of desired spatial frequencies rather than the number of pixels in the image. The points may be regularly distributed over the spatial-frequency plane or concentrated in one or several irregularly shaped regions of interest. The interferometric optical Fourier processor is demonstrated in a moving-object trajectory estimation system. The system successfully estimates the trajectory of multiple objects moving over both stationary and white-noise backgrounds. A comparison of performance was made with all-digital computation. With everything else equal, our hybrid optical-digital calculation was more than 3 orders of magnitude faster.     

TALBOT干涉原理与微小位移测量研究

本文从光波传播理论出发,运用近代光学和几何光学原理讨论了广义TALBOT 效应;用莫尔偏转技术讨论了 TALBOT 干涉仪原理;以此建立了测量微小的 TALBOT 干涉仪数学、物理模型。比对测量表明测量原理正确、可靠。