Phase-shifting interferometry by wave amplitude modulation

A new method for phase-shifting interferometry based on wave amplitude modulation is proposed and discussed. This proposal is based on the interference of three waves, where two waves attend as two reference waves and the other wave attends as a probe wave. Thereby, three interference terms are obtained, but because a phase difference of pi/2 between the two references is kept constant, one of the three terms will be dropped, while the two remaining will be put in quadrature. Under these conditions, the resulting pattern is mathematically modeled by an interferogram of two waves, where an additional phase is given by the amplitude variations of the reference waves. In this Letter, both a theoretical model and some numerical simulations are presented. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America