Abstract
A homodyne interferometer with quadrature detector systems has a cyclic error that restricts accuracy and resolution in a nanometrology regime. In this short paper, we discuss the method of successfully reducing the cyclic error caused by the imperfections of optical components such as polarizing beam splitters and wave plates by means of adjusting the gains of detectors. Most polarizing beam splitters exhibit some loss and not perfect extinction ratio. We show that the cyclic error can be reduced to the order of 0.01 nm when the detector gains for the transmitted and reflected beams of a polarizing beam splitter are adjusted to be specifically related to each other.
