Nanometer-Scale Vibration Measurement Using an Optical Quadrature Interferometer Based on 3 × 3 Fiber-Optic Coupler

Abstract

We propose a nanometer-scale displacement or vibration measurement system, using an optical quadrature interferometer and the post-processing technique that extracts the parameters necessary for characterizing the interferometric system. Using a 3 × 3 fiber-optic coupler, the entire complex interference signal could be reconstructed with two interference signals measured at two return ports of the coupler. The intrinsic phase difference between the return ports was utilized to obtain the quadratic part of the interference signal, which allowed one to reconstruct the entire complex interference signal. However, the two measured signals were appreciably affected by the unequal detector gains and non-uniform intrinsic phases of the coupler. Fortunately, we could find that the Lissajous curve plotted by the two signals of the interferometric system would form an ellipse. Therefore, by fitting the measured Lissajous curve to an ellipse, we could extract the parameters characterizing the actual system, which allowed the nanometer-scale measurement. Experimental results showed that a 20 kHz sinusoidal vibration with an amplitude of 1.5 nm could be measured with a standard deviation of 0.4 nm.

Keywords

• optical quadrature detection
• optical interferometer
• vibration measurement
• displacement measurement
• 3 × 3 fiber-optic coupler
• Lissajous curve