Mach-Zender interferometer

In physics, the Mach–Zehnder interferometer is a device used to determine the relative phase shift variations between two collimated beams derived by splitting light from a single source. The interferometer has been used, among other things, to measure phase shifts between the two beams caused by a sample or a change in length of one of the paths. The apparatus is named after the physicists Ludwig Mach (the son of Ernst Mach) and Ludwig Zehnder: Zehnder's proposal in an 1891 article was refined by Mach in an 1892 article.

The Mach–Zehnder interferometer is a highly configurable instrument. In contrast to the well-known Michelson interferometer, each of the well-separated light paths is traversed only once.

If it is decided to produce fringes in white light, then, since white light has a limited coherence length, on the order of micrometers, great care must be taken to simultaneously equalize the optical paths over all wavelengths or no fringes will be visible. As seen in Fig. 1, a compensating cell made of the same type of glass as the test cell (so as to have equal optical dispersion) would be placed in the path of the reference beam to match the test cell. Note also the precise orientation of the beam splitters. The reflecting surfaces of the beam splitters would be oriented so that the test and reference beams pass through an equal amount of glass. In this orientation, the test and reference beams each experience two front-surface reflections, resulting in the same number of phase inversions. The result is that light traveling an equal optical path length in the test and reference beams produces a white light fringe of constructive interference.

Collimated sources result in a nonlocalized fringe pattern. Localized fringes result when an extended source is used. In Fig. 2, we see that the fringes can be adjusted so that they are localized in any desired plane. In most cases, the fringes would be adjusted to lie in the same plane as the test object, so that fringes and test object can be photographed together.

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