Phase-shifting diffraction grating interferometer for testing concave mirrors

We present a novel concept of phase-shifting diffraction-grating interferometer, which is intended for the optical testing of concave mirrors with high precision. The interferometer is configured with a single reflective diffraction grating, which performs manifold functions of beam splitting, beam recombination, and phase shifting. The reference and test wave fronts are generated by means of reflective diffraction at the focal plane of a microscope objective with large numerical aperture, which allows testing fast mirrors with low f-numbers. The fiber-optic confocal design is adopted for the microscope objective to focus a converging beam on the diffractive grating, which greatly reduces the alignment error between the focusing optics and the diffraction grating. Translating the grating provides phase shifting, which enables to measure the figure errors of the test mirror to nanometer accuracy.