Optical frequency domain angle measurement in a femtosecond laser autocollimator

Opt Express. 2017 Jul 10;25(14):16725-16738. doi: 10.1364/OE.25.016725.

Abstract

A mode-locked laser autocollimator, in which a group of first-order diffracted beams from a grating reflector are detected by an autocollimation unit, has an expanded angle measurement range compared with a conventional autocollimator using a single-wavelength laser source. In this paper, a new optical frequency domain angle measurement method is proposed to increase the visibility of output signal of the mode-locked femtosecond laser autocollimator, which is limited by the overlap of the focused diffracted light spots. The output visibility of a prototype femtosecond laser autocollimator has been increased by the proposed method to approximately 100% over a large range of 21600 arc-seconds.