Passive error compensating device for optical alignment

摘要

A passive compensating device which compensates for angular and translational misalignment errors in a polarized beam and assures the projected beam centroid remains at the same position. The device splits the incoming beam into two beams. Thereafter, optical orienting means disposed to intercept the two beams is operative to rotate the wavefront of both beams so that the composite beam exiting a combiner has two components wherein one component has its wavefront rotated 180 DEG about two orthogonal axes with respect to the other beam. Accordingly, the composite beam centroid is maintained at one position regardless of jitter of the beam entering the compensator device.