Abstract. The measurement of the refractive index of optical glass samples is a common and fundamental activity in numerous fields of expertise. Several measurement techniques exist with relative accuracies from… Click to show full abstract
Abstract. The measurement of the refractive index of optical glass samples is a common and fundamental activity in numerous fields of expertise. Several measurement techniques exist with relative accuracies from 10 − 2 to, at least, 10 − 7 with complexities that are inversely related to the corresponding uncertainty. We describe an implementation of a technique based on the measurement of the lateral displacement variation of a collimated beam caused by the rotation of a parallel plate glass sample. The method was aimed to achieve an uncertainty in the range from 10 − 3 to 10 − 4 without increasing the complexity normally associated with techniques with this level of accuracy. The system was designed and optimized based on a detailed analysis of the uncertainty budget. We describe the implementation, the data processing, and the results obtained with calibrated samples, showing a relative uncertainty at the level of 10 − 4.
               
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