Measurement of air refractive index fluctuation based on a laser synthetic wavelength interferometer

A novel method for measuring air refractive index fluctuation based on a laser synthetic wavelength interferometer is proposed. The change of air refractive index is regarded as an equivalent measured displacement in the measurement arm, which can be realized by tracking a large compensative displacement of the reference mirror in the reference arm of the laser synthetic wavelength interferometer. The merit of the proposed method is that the slight air refractive index fluctuation is magnified to a large displacement on the order of millimeters or micrometers. To verify the feasibility of the proposed method, the correlation experiment between the displacement of the reference mirror and the air refractive index fluctuation and the comparison experiments with Edlén equations both in short time and long time were performed. Experimental results show that the measurement accuracy of the air refractive index fluctuation is better than 3.7 × 10^–8. (paper)