Precise characterization of diffraction grating groove patterns.

Non-equidistant and non-parallel grooves of a diffraction grating distort the diffracted wavefront. For a fixed wavelength, a grating with an arbitrary groove pattern is equivalent to a grating with perfect grooves having an effective surface profile different from the geometric one. It is shown that the previously proposed method for measuring non-equidistance can be used for simultaneous measurement of non-parallelism, and the measurement error is determined without any a priori information and fitting parameters.