Feedback stabilized fabry-perot interferometer.

A method of stabilizing a Fabry-Perot interferometer with respect to a reference wavelength, while simultaneously stabilizing the parallelism of the flats, is described. The method consists of creating correcting signals proportional to the displacement of the fringe maxima of three auxiliary spectral sources with respect to a fixed reference point and feeding these signals back to the interferometer piezoelectric drive so that the correcting signals become time invariant, and the interferometer is stabilized. The stability of the finished instrument with respect to the reference wavelength and parallelism is near lambda/1000, at 546 nm, for a 6-h period; however, the actual parallelism of the etalon is limited by the surface defects of the flats. The method, as described, allows simultaneous stabilization and data taking, since the instrument is continuously updating itself.