Abstract
A method of absolute testing of a cylindrical wavefront is presented. The method is a merging of the random ball test method with the fiber optic reference test. The random ball test assumes a large number of interferograms of a good quality sphere with errors that are statistically distributed such that the average of the errors goes to zero. The fiber optic reference test utilizes a specially processed optical fiber to provide a high quality reference wave from an incident line focus from the cylindrical wave under test. A simulation and preliminary experiment results are presented which indicate that this method can significantly reduce the effects of fiber surface errors, yielding more accurate cylindrical wave measurements. (C) The Authors.