PTB PhD student wins Young Scientist Award of CC UPOB for high-precision optical form measurement on moderately curved optical surfaces

Jan Spichtinger, a PhD student from PTB, won this year’s award for the best young scientist at the 12. High Level Expert Meeting on Asphere Metrology. The “Ultrapräzise Oberflächenbearbeitung” e.V. (Ultraprecise Surface Processing) Competence Center (CC UPOB) held this meeting virtually on 15-16 March 2022. The event was rounded off with the presentation of the Young Scientist Award (YSA) which honors young scientists in the fields of high-precision surface manufacturing and metrology. The meeting’s audience that was made up of experts from these fields selected the PTB doctoral student because of his work on the high-accuracy form measurement of moderately curved optical surfaces. He presented his research under the title of “Stitching interferometry for moderately curved freeform surfaces” and went on to introduce a new measurement method called SCaLA (stitching interferometry with cavity length and angle measurement). This method is an extension of conventional stitching interferometry. It is based on aligning an interferometer with a flat reference surface perpendicularly to a surface at each measurement position and then measuring the distance to it. In addition, tilt sensors are used to correct the angle errors of the motion system, and there is a global stitching algorithm which reconstructs the surface form. Real and virtual measurements were used to demonstrate exactly what this method can provide. In the future, PTB aims to use SCaLA on a form measuring system for moderately curved test specimens with diameters of up to 1.5 meters.

Contact:
Department 4.2 Imaging and Wave Optics
J. Spichtinger, jan.spichtinger(at)ptb.de, phone: +49 531 592-4208
G. Ehret, gerd.ehret(at)ptb.de, phone: +49 531 592-4200