Design and application of Michelson interferometer

The traditional Michelson interferometer can only simply present the interference image of light, and can not vividly reflect the fluctuation and morphological characteristics of light.Moreover, the measurement process is tedious.Aiming at these problems, a novel Michelson interferometer experimental device based on digital holography technology was presented.Instead of the plane mirrors of the traditional Michelson interferometer, two charge coupled-device (CCD) cameras were used to record the interference fields, which were generated by the interference of the spherical light and the planar reference light.Then the complex amplitude information of spherical light on the CCD recording plane was obtained directly by using the digital holography, and the least square fitting was utilized to compute the spherical parameters, the complex amplitude of spherical light was demodulated to obtain the centering complex amplitude.Finally, the interference phenomenon of two spherical lights was realized by digital interferometry.Experiment results show that the device can vividly display the 3D image of the incident spherical light and the interference image of two spherical lights in real time.In addition, according to the fitting parameters, the refractive index of transparent equal thickness medium can be measured conveniently.The refractivity of 3 kinds of materials measured by experiments show that the error can be controlled within ±5% and the measurement accuracy is high.