Ubiquitous coherence―boon and bale of the optical metrologist

摘要

Commonly, optical systems are called coherent, if a laser is used (right), and incoherent if other sources come into play (wrong). Most opticists are not aware that parasitic spatial coherence is ubiquitous, even if it is unobvious. The pretended incoherent approach may lead to significant quantitative measuring errors of illumination or reflectivity, 3d shape, size or distance. On the other hand, a favourable property of spatial coherence is that among the "speckle noise" we may reveal useful information about the object, by white light interferometry. This report will discuss simple rules to estimate the occuring errors and how to reduce spatial coherence. We will further discuss the complex signal formation in white light interferometry and roughness measurements far beyond the bandwidth limit of the observing optics.