Nonnull interferometric testing of spherical gratings under Littrow conditions with opposite diffraction orders

Diffracted wavefront measurements are qualitative and comprehensive verifications for the spherical grating that was manufactured to specifications. Direct interferometric testing of the diffracted wavefront is convenient and implemented by tilting the spherical grating at a Littrow angle to obtain autoreflection and then results in a non-null interferometric testing configuration. The diffracted wavefront of the spherical grating contains not only wavefront errors induced by the manufacturing imperfections but also inherent wavefront contributions from the autoreflection testing setup. The magnitudes of the latter are affected by both the spherical substrate and the groove pattern. Through the analysis of geometric aberrations of spherical gratings, the groove pattern contributions are demonstrated to be contrary for the opposite diffraction orders. A non-null interferometric testing of spherical gratings is proposed without foreknowledge of the groove pattern, in which the wavefront errors contributed only by the manufacturing imperfections are derived from dual measurements under Littrow conditions with opposite diffraction orders. Simulations are implemented for varied line spacing (VLS) spherical gratings with an F-number slower than 1.5 and groove density varying from 150 to 300 lp/mm, and the residual error less than 0.004 lambda RMS is obtained. The residual misalignment error after conventionally removing defocus and tilt is further analyzed and discussed. A VLS grating in which theNAis 0.13 and groove density is 200 lp/mm is chosen as an experimental sample, and the diffracted wavefront error with 0.018 lambda RMSis obtained. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America