Experimental study on hybrid compensation testing of an off-axis convex ellipsoid surface.

Aspherical surfaces can provide significant benefits to a wide variety of optical systems, but manufacturing high-precision aspherical surfaces has historically been limited by the ability to measure them. Null testing has always been the ideal method in aspherical measurement. However, in many cases, it is hard to realize null testing for complex surfaces, especially for convex surfaces in complicated forms. In this paper, we propose a hybrid compensation method combining a spherical mirror and a computer generated hologram (CGH) to achieve the null testing of the convex aspherical surface. Firstly, we introduce our self-developed mathematical models in the hybrid compensation method, including optics alignment model, distortion correction model and spherical surface error removing model. Then the performance of our proposed method is analyzed by a null testing experiment of an off-axis convex ellipsoid mirror. The experimental result shows that the proposed method can accomplish the hybrid compensation testing of convex aspherical surfaces effectively, and it can also bring much to the application of our method in convex aspherical surface testing. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement