Fabrication of optical mosaic gratings: a self-referencing alignment method.

We propose and demonstrate a self-referencing alignment technique to conveniently enlarge fabricated grating area. The latent image gratings are used as the reference objects to align (adjust and lock) the attitude and position of the substrate relative to the exposure beams between and during consecutive exposures. The adjustment system and the fringe-locking system are combined into the exposure system, eliminating the drift errors between them and making the whole system low-cost and compact. For the fabricated 1 × 4 mosaics of 50 × (30 + 30 + 30 + 30) mm(2) area and 1 × 2 mosaics of 90 × (80 + 80) mm(2) area, the typical peak-valley -1st-order wavefront errors measured by a 100-mm-diameter interferometer are not more than 0.06 λ and 0.09 λ, respectively.