Periodic nonlinearity resulting from ghost reflections in heterodyne interferometry

Periodic nonlinearity is a systematic error limiting the accuracy of displacement measurements at the nanometer level. It results from many causes such as frequency mixing, polarization mixing, polarization-frequency mixing, and ghost reflections. The purpose of this paper is to study the periodic nonlinearity resulting from ghost reflections, which has not been investigated before. A generalized scheme of interferometer, which is free of frequency and polarization mixings, is used in the study. This ensures that the residual periodic nonlinearity is from the ghost reflections only. In this paper, a general form of periodic nonlinearity and a model including two kinds of ghost reflections, one with the same frequency and the other with two frequencies, are presented. The model is verified by experimental results. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.