A high performance one-dimensional homodyne encoder and the proof of principle of a novel two-dimensional homodyne encoder

•A one-dimensional homodyne encoder with three channels was developed.•This one-dimensional homodyne encoder had a periodic nonlinearity of less than ±50pm with HEIDENHAIN EIB 741.•It had a periodic nonlinearity of less than ±10pm with a home-built phase meter and off-line Heydemann correction.•A novel two-dimensional homodyne encoder was devised and it was proven by the proof-of-principle experiment. Displacement laser interferometers and interferometric encoders currently are the dominating solutions to the displacement measurement applications which require measurement uncertainties in the order of a few nanometers over hundreds of millimeters of measurement range. But, in comparison with interferometric encoders, to achieve nanometer order or even lower measurement uncertainties, displacement laser interferometers require much stricter environmental control if not vacuum, which will increase their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Therefore interferometric encoders are getting more and more preferable. Furthermore, for some applications, the measurement of the out-of-plane displacement is required as well. Therefore, in this work, a one-dimensional interferometric encoder was built and investigated, a novel two-dimensional (one is in-plane, the other one is out-of-plane) interferometric encoder was devised and its principle was proven experimentally. For the one-dimensional encoder, a periodic nonlinearity of ±50pm with HEIDENHAIN EIB 741 and a periodic nonlinearity of less than ±10pm with a home built phase meter and off-line Heydemann correction were identified through a comparison measurement with a differential heterodyne interferometer. In addition, this one-dimensional encoder was identified to have a better measurement stability compared to the differential heterodyne interferometer.