I have a glass cell in which my lab group is keen to trap single atoms using an optical tweezer (objective sits outside the glass cell). Before we do so, it is key to characterise the flatness and the thickness of the glass cell so that we will know how well shaped our tweezer beam will be.
I have attempted to perform such measurements using a Michelson interferometer and a LED light source (centered at 630nm) with short coherence length.
Unfortunately, the glass cell is anti-reflection coated, and I am unable to get an intense enough reflection from the glass cell to interference with the reference arm in my Michelson interferometer.
Are there any ways to go around this? Or are there other measurement techniques that I could use?
In most cases using reflections is the simplest way to characterize an optical surface. Try to do your measurement at a wavelength where you have sufficient reflection from the AR coated surfaces.
Following Karsten Schuhmann 's comment, AR coatings, generally, are wavelength specific. so if you use a wavelength where the AR coating is no longer effective, you should be able to get some reflections coming off. this is just a hypothesis, but I suggest, depending on your exact methodology, that you use a blue lasers
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