Three-wave radial shearing interferometer

We propose a simple and compact three-wave radial shearing interferometer (TWRSI). This interferometer is constructed by a Gabor zone plate (GZP) and a charge-coupled device (CCD). The nominal plane wavefront under test is diffracted by the GZP into three orders (i.e., a parallel beam, a converging spherical beam, and a diverging spherical beam) leading to an interference pattern. In the imaging plane, three beams can be considered as being the copies of the incident beam, the compressed beam, and the expanded beam, respectively. A CCD detector located in the vicinity of the GZP records this interference pattern. Wavefront can be reconstructed by a single interferogram. The experiment result shows that the proposed method is correct and accurate. This TWRSI is compact, vibration insensitive, suitable for measurement of continuous and transient wavefront.