Quality inspection of cube beam splitters by a white light interferometric approach

Beam splitters have a wide range of applications as a key component in optical systems. Adopting beam splitters with geometric defects in an optical system, e.g., an interferometric measurement system, may cause additional optical path difference and degrade the measurement accuracy. The quality inspection of beam splitters is essential to meet the accuracy requirements for modern optical systems. Most of the current quality inspection methods rely on inefficient and inaccurate manual observation. Therefore, for commonly used cube beam splitters (CBSs), we propose a digital method to quantify the geometric quality based on the white light interferometric principle. A Fourier domain analysis is used to calculate the CBS misalignment error and perpendicularity error. This method is verified by inspecting six different CBS samples. The experimental results show that all samples have varying degrees of misalignment and perpendicularity errors. The maximum perpendicularity error is 0.93°, and three of the six samples have misalignment errors larger than 50 µm. Nanometer level precision of the misalignment measurement can be achieved.