Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Joanna Schmit.
Interference measurements of a polychromatic partially coherent light source verify the existence of a temporal correlation vortex. Topological dispersion is found to destabilize this singularity.
We study the effects of an extended light source on the calibration of an interference microscope, also referred to as an optical profiler. Theoretical and experimental numerical aperture (NA) factors for circular and linear light sources along with collimated laser illumination demonstrate that the shape of the light source or effective aperture cone is critical for a correct NA factor calculation. In practice, more-accurate results for the NA factor are obtained when a linear approximation to the filament light source shape is used in a geometric model. We show that previously measured and derived NA factors show some discrepancies because a circular rather than linear approximation to the filament source was used in the modeling.
White-light interferometric techniques allow high-precision shape measurement of objects with discontinuous structures by detecting the peak of the coherence envelope. These techniques assume a specific change in the optical path difference (OPD) between the interfering beams; however, the scanning device effecting that change often introduces OPD errors that are carried over to the measurements. We present a technique for measuring OPD changes from the collected interference fringes during each measurement. Information about the scan is directly fed into the algorithm, which compensates for the errors, resulting in improved measurement accuracy. The method corrects not only the scanner errors but also slowly varying vibrations. In addition, this technique can be easily adapted to any existing low-coherence interferometer because no large data storage or postprocessing is required.