Interferometric tolerance determination for a Dove prism using exact ray trace

We use exact ray trace to calculate the interferometric Dove prism tolerance to manufacturing errors. We model the manufacturing errors by modifying the position of the prism vertices. The normal to the prism faces establishes the direction of the rays. We determine the prism tolerance by analyzing the optical traversed path rays. We evaluate the change in the image quality introduced by the normal deviation. When the manufacturing tolerance is maintained within +/- 0.35 arc sec, the maximum wave-front deviation is better than lambda/10 at 633 nm. We found that a Dove prism with such tolerance introduces an OPD of two orders of magnitude lesser than a commercial Dove prism. The exact ray trace accuracy of the developed program is validated with the commercially available optical-design program OSLO (TM). The calculated tolerance complements a previous analysis of a Dove prism for its implementation in a rotationally shearing interferometer. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.