Common-path interferometer with a tri-window.

A common-path interferometer is proposed with a tri-window. It is built using a 4f optical system with Ronchi ruling as a spatial filter. The input rectangular aperture is formed by three windows; the central window supports a phase object, and the other two are used for reference beams. Using an appropriate grating period relative to input aperture size, an interferogram containing three patterns can be obtained in the output plane. The object phase can then be reconstructed from the three patterns using just one interferogram. The experiments are carried out to demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed scheme.