Extraction of Carrier Phase Delay for Nonlinear Errors Compensation of PGC Demodulation in an SPM Interferometer

Traditional phase generated carrier (PGC) schemes require that the carrier phase delay be kept zero and the phase modulation depth be maintained at a certain value; otherwise, serious nonlinear errors will be introduced into the phase demodulation of a sinusoidal phase modulation interferometer. Proposed herein is a robust carrier phase delay extraction method for nonlinear errors compensation of PGC demodulation that mitigates the effect of the interference phase shift. The carrier phase delay is directly extracted by adopting the first-, second-, and fourth-order in-phase and quadrature harmonic components generated by quadrature multi-harmonics frequency down conversion. Further, with the extracted phase delay, real-time compensations for the phase delay and phase demodulation depth are realized simultaneously in PGC demodulation. Theoretical analysis and derivation of the proposed method are given in detail. Simulation and displacement measurement experiments with different phase delays and phase modulation depths are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to precisely extract the phase delay and efficiently eliminate the effects of the phase delay and modulation depth instability.