The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 28, 1987
Filed:
Dec. 19, 1984
Ning Wu, Rancho Palos Verdes, CA (US);
Hughes Aircraft Company, Los Angeles, CA (US);
Abstract
An improved method and apparatus for measuring the aberrated wave slope of an optical beam. The apparatus includes a shearing interferometer having a reference mirror 14 and a steerable mirror 16 mounted perpendicularly to one another with a beam splitter 10 disposed at a 45.degree. angle to each. The beam splitter 10 directs a portion of the incident beam to the reference mirror to form a reference beam 20 and transmits a portion 22 of the incident beam to the steerable mirror. The steerable mirror 16 is pivoted about two mutually perpendicular axes to form a shearing interference pattern at a detector array 24 when a portion of the incident beam is reflected off the steerable mirror 16 and combines with the reference beam 20 reflected off the reference mirror. The reference mirror 14 is periodically displaced to modulate the reference beam 20. In operation, the steerable mirror 16 is first oriented pivotally about a first axis perpendicular to the propagation axis of the incident beam to a pre-selected angle and the reference mirror is then periodically displaced. The variations in detector intensities are sampled and stored N times during this reference mirror displacement. The steerable mirror is then oriented at the same pre-selected angle about a second axes perpendicular to the first pivotal axis and the beam propagation axis and the reference mirror 14 again periodically displaced. The resulting detector intensity values can be manipulated to yield the phase of the initially distorted beam which can be converted into aberrated wave slope data.