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A measurement method based on interferometry with two different reference cavity lengths is presented and applied in air refractive index measurement in which the two cavity lengths and a laser wavelength are combined to generate two wavelength equivalents of cavity. Corresponding calculation equations are derived, and the optical path configuration is designed, which is inspired by the traditional synthetic wavelength method. Theoretical analyses indicate that the measurement uncertainty of the determined index of refraction is about 2.3×10(-8), which is mainly affected by the length precision of the long vacuum cavity and the ellipticity of polarization components of the dual-frequency laser, and the range of nonambiguity is 3.0×10(-5), which is decided by the length difference of the two cavities. Experiment results show that the accuracy of air refractive index measurement is better than 5.0×10(-8) when the laboratory conditions changes slowly. The merit of the presented method is that the classical refractometry can be also used without evacuation of the gas cavity during the experiment. Furthermore, the application of the traditional synthetic wavelength method may be extended by using the wavelength equivalents of cavity, any value of which can be easily acquired by changing cavity length rather than using actual wavelengths whose number is limited.

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At present the formulae proposed by G Boensch and E Potulski in 1998 (Boensch and Potulski 1998 Metrologia 35 133–9) are mostly used to calculate the air refractive index. However, the humidity correction equation in the formulae is derived by using the light source of a Cd lamp whose light frequency stability is poor and at a narrow temperature range, around 20 °C. So it is no longer suitable in present optical precision measurements. To solve this problem, we propose a refractive index measurement system based on phase step interferometer with three frequency stabilized lasers (532 nm, 633 nm, 780 nm), corrected coefficients of the humidity are measured and a corresponding revised humidity correction equation is acquired. Meanwhile, the application temperature range is extended from 14.6 °C to 25.0 °C. The experiment comparison results at the temperature of 22.2–23.2 °C show the accuracy by the presented equation is better than that of Boensch and Potulski.

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