Compact displacement sensor C01

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The standard PICOSCALE C01 Sensor Head has one port of the beam splitter unused for interferometer purposes. Typically, this part of the beam splitter has a coarse grinding so that one can use it as a view port for alignment (see schematic). This view port we call SmarAlign window in the following. When the pilot laser beam of the PICOSCALE is activated, the visible light can be used to trace the propagation path to the target mirror as well as its reflection back to the sensor head. If the reflected beam hits the sensor head, one can see two spots in the SmarAlign window. By fine adjustment of the tip/tilt angle of the sensor head, these two spots can be overlapped which means the two beams can interfere.