Fiber based Mach-Zehnder interferometer for measuring wave aberrations of microlenses

The wave aberrations shall be measured for refractive lenses in transmitted light. Therefore, a Mach-Zehnder geometry is used where a telescopic micro sope is incorporated in the object light path and the reference wavefront i s a plane wave travelling alone the reference path of the Mach-Zehnder inte rferometer. One of the boundary conditions has been that rather big lens ar rays should be measurable which requires a rather large x,y-stage and in ad dition a perpendicular support for the lens arrays. This has been the reaso n why we decided to implement the Mach-Zehnder geometry into a commercial m icroscope from Carl Zeiss Jena (JENATECH). This could only be realized usin g a fiber-based solution. The interference microscope is equipped with a pl ane and spherical "probe wavefront" illumination.