Investigation of cross-polarized heterodyne technique for measuring refractive index and thickness of glass panels

A new mathematical model of cross-polarized heterodyning is proposed for measuring glass panels. An optical system is presented for obtaining relative thickness variation and difference distribution of refractive indices simultaneously, and the dual-balanced coherent demodulation technique is used. The experiment results show that the transmittance of light beam can be less than 0.5% when the vibration amplitude of the glass panels is equal to 5 mm. It takes about 200 s to scan the whole glass sample with size of 1430 × 1360 mm2. The resolution of the thickness variation is 0.3 μm, and the lateral sampling resolution is 1 mm.