Acquisition of the Surface Morphology of Ruled Gratings with a Microscope Objective

In this paper, an optical microscope objective with large numerical number is inserted into a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, and this system is adopted to detect the surface morphologies of two ruled transmission gratings with area scale to a micrometer. The object waves transmitting from the gratings interfere with spherical reference wave, and the interferograms constructed are recorded by a high-resolution CCD. The surface maps of the gratings are retrieved from the interferograms, and the results are confirmed by the measurement with an atomic force microscope, with detection errors in nanometer scale. This work provides an optical non-destructive method for precise detection of small-area sophisticated object surfaces with an optical microscope objective.