title: Temperature-fluctuation-sensitive accumulative effect of the phase measurement errors in low-coherence interferometry in characterizing arrayed waveguide gratings.
abstract: We investigate the accumulative effect of the phase measurement errors in characterizing optical multipath components by low-coherence interferometry. The accumulative effect is caused by the fluctuation of the environment temperature, which leads to the variation of the refractive index of the device under test. The resulting phase measurement errors accumulate with the increasing of the phase difference between the two interferometer arms. Our experiments were carried out to demonstrate that the accumulative effect is still obvious even though the thermo-optical coefficient of the device under test is quite small. Shortening the measurement time to reduce the fluctuation of the environment temperature can effectively restrain the accumulative effect. The experiments show that when the scanning speed increases to 4.8 mm/s, the slope of the phase measurement errors decreases to 5.52×10(-8), which means the accumulative effect can be ignored.
authors.forename: Changyun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.forename: Bing
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Longzhi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Gencheng
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Yuehai
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Xiaoqing
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.forename: Yubo
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Jianyi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004867:Equipment Design; D007368:Interferometry / Q000295:instrumentation* / Q000379:methods*; D008027:Light; D016011:Normal Distribution; D055096:Optical Devices; D055095:Optics and Photonics; D012031:Refractometry / Q000295:instrumentation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D059629:Signal-To-Noise Ratio; D013696:Temperature