Precision metrology: from bulk optics towards metasurface optics

Abstract

With increasing digitalisation of engineering and the development of smart manufacturing, precision metrology is gradually moving away from the laboratory into real-world environments and production platforms. Interferometry and focus detection are the most popular optical techniques for these types of application due to their non-destructive measurement, high resolution, and fast response. In this article, we discuss their basic principles, limitations and challenges, and new opportunities. Motivated by the rapid development of artificial materials, the application of metasurfaces to drive a new era for future miniaturisation of optical systems becomes suddenly viable. The article discusses advances in modern miniaturisation of optical techniques; and introduces an approach for evolving to a future using metasurface optics. Optical principles and feasibility studies are included in the discussion.

KEYWORDS:

• Precision metrology
• interferometry
• focus detection
• metasurfaces

Acknowledgements

The authors particularly acknowledge useful discussion and suggestions received from Dr Haydn Martin, Professor David Whitehouse, Professor Paul J Scott, Mr Simon Mckenna, Dr Dawei Tang and Dr James Williamson during the preparation of this paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded programme EP/T02643X/1, and the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering and Renishaw PLC who sponsor Xiangqian Jiang’s REng/Renishaw Research Chair.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiangqian Jiang

Xiangqian (Jane) Jiang, holds a Royal Academy of Engineering/Renishaw Chair in Precision Metrology and is the Director of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Future Metrology Hub. She obtained her PhD in measurement science, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China in 1995; a DSc for precision engineering, University of Huddersfield in 2007; and received an honorary DSc from City, University of London in 2019. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the International Academy of Production Research (Collège International pour la Recherche en Productique, CIRP). She has previously held a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award and European Research Council Advanced Investigator Grant. She received a Damehood in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2017. She has a broad range of interests in advanced metrology, which span modelling non-Euclidean geometries and freeform surface analytics, in-situ and in-process surface/geometry measurement technologies and nanophotonics-enabled optical sensors and instruments, especially metasurfaces.

Andrew Henning

Andrew Henning received his PhD in Physics from the University of Nottingham in 2009. After working as a post-doc at Imperial College London, and as a higher research scientist at NPL he joined the Optical metrology group at the Centre for Precision Technologies at the University of Huddersfield in 2016. His research interests cover a broad range of electromagnetics, currently with a specific focus on optical instrumentation and metamaterials.