Errors in fabricating and installing reflective prisms

Зверев В.А., Рытова Е.С., Тимощук И.Н. Погрешности изготовления и установки отражательных призм // Оптический журнал. 2011. Т. 78. № 3. С. 14–20.

Zverev V.A., Rytova E.S., Timoshchuk I.N. Errors in fabricating and installing reflective prisms [in Russian] // Opticheskii Zhurnal. 2011. V. 78. № 3. P. 14–20.

V. A. Zverev, E. S. Rytova, and N. N. Timoshchuk, "Errors in fabricating and installing reflective prisms," Journal of Optical Technology. 78(3), 164-169 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1364/JOT.78.000164

This paper analyzes how errors of fabrication and deployment affect the position of the baseline (the optical axis) when reflective prisms are being assembled. An expression is obtained for the law of refraction in matrix form, making it possible to use a simple and obvious derivation to obtain the decoplanarity invariant. By applying it successively to each of the surfaces of a prism, we obtain after the last surface the deviation of the ray coming out of the prism from the plane of the principal cross section in the form of a function of the deviations of the normals to all the surfaces of the prism from its principal cross section—i.e., of the decoplanarity of the normals to the surfaces of the prism.