Diffractive simultaneous bidirectional shearing interferometry using tailored spatially coherent light

Measurements of wavefront deformations can be carried out with the help of lateral shearing interferometers. Here the focus is on a setup providing two shears along orthogonal directions simultaneously to generate the data needed for a reconstruction. We describe a diffractive solution using Ronchi phase gratings with a suppressed zeroth order for both the doubling of the wavefront under test and the bidirectional shearing unit. A series arrangement of the gratings offers an on-axis geometry, which minimizes the systematic errors of the test. For illumination, an extended incoherent monochromatic light source is used. High-contrast fringes can be obtained by tailoring the degree of coherence via a periodic intensity distribution. (c) 2011 Optical Society of America