Fast and direct calibration for high numerical aperture quadriwave lateral shearing interferometry using geometry model with higher-order Taylor expansion

Abstract

The current research on quadriwave lateral shearing interferometry (LSI) is primarily focused on the measurements of plane wave or quasiplane wave. When directly measuring spherical waves with high numerical apertures (NA>0.35), it will generate additional systematic errors, which affect measurement accuracy. To make the quadriwave LSI applicable to the measurements of a high-NA spherical wave, this paper proposes a fast and direct calibration method by establishing the geometry model of the quadriwave LSI with high-NA spherical wave incidence. The expression for the optical path difference represented systematic errors introduced by high-NA spherical waves in the shearing wavefronts are derived, which utilize a ninth-order Taylor expansion and Zernike polynomials fitting to achieve the high accuracy required by the high-NA spherical wave incidence. Then, the systematic errors are directly calibrated in the shearing wavefronts of four directions. This paper presents the theoretical analysis and verifies the feasibility and reliability of the proposed method through simulations and experiments, achieving a good measurement accuracy.