Lens testing with a simple wavefront shearing interferometer.

A lens-testing system using a simple wavefront shearing interferometer is described. This simple cube interferometer has all the interferometric adjustments built in at manufacture. In contrast to most interferometric test systems, the wavefront shearing interferometer is inexpensive, portable, relatively insensitive to vibration, does not need laser illumination, and requires only a minimum of experimental time and operational expertise. Reading of the interferograms and subsequent data reduction require the major effort in testing with the wavefront shearing interferometer. However, with automatic scanning of the interferograms and a high-speed electronic computer to perform the analysis, the data reduction may be completely automated. Operation of the wavefront shearing interferometer is described together with the method of data reduction. Experimental results are also presented.