Non-destructive collimation technique for measuring glass constants using a Ronchi grating shearing interferometer

A non-destructive liquid immersion collimation technique in combination with a Ronchi grating shearing interferometer has been used for determining the constants of a transparent glass material, especially when it is in the form of a lens. Due to its simplicity and the fact that it will work equally well at any wavelength, the technique is superior to existing methods for determining the various glass constants (refractive index, Abbe number or v-value, partial dispersion factor etc).The shearing fringes appearing inside a Ronchi-gram are adequate to locate the exact position of the point source which has been treated as the target in the present communication. The fringe-free space in the overlapping region between the two laterally displaced spherical wavefronts indicates the sharply focused position of the target which corresponds to zero defocusing. In this way the target displacements with different liquids are determined.