Self-referenced interferometer for form measurement of hollow cylinders

We present a new self-referenced interferometer for the form measurement of hollow cylindrical tubes that provides the accuracy in the micrometer range. It is based on a simple and robust setup where the reference and object waves are represented by the central and peripheral parts, respectively, of the conical wave generated by a single axicon. The inteferogram is characterized by a closed-fringe pattern with a circular carrier which allows for the interference phase demodulation using spatial synchronous detection. The misalignment aberrations are corrected by an iterative computational procedure. The measurement capabilities of the interferometer are experimentally tested for the glass and stainless steel tubes with lengths from 220 mm to 600 mm.