Experimental setup for the quality evaluation of optical materials

Modern photonic elements and systems are based upon novel optical materials. The material optical quality is a crucial parameter for any photonic application. The paper deals with the design and initial verification of optical quality evaluation system allowing fast near-mass-production evaluation of several qualitative parameters both spatially distributed and integral. The semi-automatic setup includes the schlieren-optics imaging, OFT (optical Fourier transform) imaging and integral metrics for overall quantitative assessment. Initial experimental results are demonstrated on mercurous chloride samples.