Feature

Surface roughness, interferometers dominate standards discourse

Robert E. Parks

Major topics for discussion at the OSA Standards Committee Aug. 15 meeting in San Diego were the specification of spatial bandwidth in the measurement of surface finish, the calibration or standardization of interferometric wavefront measurement instrumentation, and the writing of an optical measurement procedures guide. The discussion of surface finish measurement centered around the need to specify more than just an rms surface roughness number. To see that this is necessary, we can consider that any surface profile can be represented by an infinite sum of spatial Fourier components.

Publish Date: 01 December 1988