Increasing the demand for the surface quality of optics, such as high-power laser, space optics, and aerospace, the development of optical polishing and fabrication techniques have been investigated. Especially, high quality and ultra-precision optical surface are significantly required for shorter wavelength due to diffraction limit. Ion beam figuring (IBF) have been used a high-end method of correcting errors on an optical surface at atomic level by sputtering, which is suitable for last processing steps. Lately, we have successfully developed a gas cluster ion beam (GCIB) that is used as a sputtering or primary ion beam for time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (ToF-SIMS). Here, we applied GCIB to polish and fabricate for several optical substrates including UV and VUV mirrors. To demonstrate this technique, we considered the GCIB parameters such as beam diameter, irradiation time, incidence angle of GCIB, and gases driving the cluster ion source. During the experiments, we used an electron flood gun to compensate surface charging on the optics. We also measured roughness profiles and surface textures in terms of before and after polishing using coherence correlation interferometry (CCI). We will discuss development possibility of GCIB as a new technique of polishing and fabrication for optical substrates.
In this research, we developed a surface inspection system based on Phase-Measuring Deflectometry for specular surfaces. PMD is a non-contact, full-field optical measuring technique that measures the phase shifts caused by surface deformations. While PMD has seen significant advancements and increasing use in various industries due to its simple configuration and moderate precision, uncertainties in alignment and calibration can limit the practical performance of the system for industrial applications. To address this, we propose a system that measures freeform optical surfaces smaller than 50x50 mm2 using stereoscopic redundancy to eliminate height ambiguity. We apply self-calibration methods to maintain measurement precision below sub-micrometer level. Our measurement results of specular surfaces demonstrate a measurement precision of less than 0.1 um, with excellent convenience and less throughput time.
In this paper, we propose a fabrication process based on Magneto-Rheological Finishing (MRF) for a reflective Spiral Phase Plate (SPP) with a continuous surface. The front surface of a nickel-plated aluminum disk is machined by diamond turning as a plane mirror, and spiral structure with low topological charge is generated by sub-aperture polishing tools, i.e., MRF. Interferometers are used to analyze the smoothness of the spiral structure, steepness of the center step and surface roughness of the random areas for the fabricated SPP. The results indicate that the direct-polishing approach can be a promising technique to fabricate high-precision SPPs.
We report an interferometric method for smooth freeform optics from the amount of sub-aperture surface profiles. The overall experimental system is composed of a 5-axis precision stage and a sub-aperture measuring interferometer, which is carefully calibrated to achieve 2 nmRMS precision. The sub-aperture interferometer adopts a broadband source in order to maximize the reliability of profile measurement, and a preliminary assumption of the overall surface is derived from the measured local 2nd derivatives which is robust to tip/tilt alignment errors during the sub-aperture acquisition. The optical surface of a 200 mm diameter 2D polynomial freeform mirror is measured based on this system and traditional contact surface profiler for the cross-validation. The experiment shows the effectiveness of the system that the mismatch against a commercial interferometer is less than 20 nmRMS.
In this paper, we propose a compensation method for the nanometer level of thermal drift by adopting long-short term memory (LSTM) algorithm. The precision of a machining process is highly affected by environmental factors. Especially in case of a single-point diamond turning (SPDT), the temperature fluctuation directly causes the unexpected displacement at nanometer scale between a diamond tool and a workpiece, even in the well-controlled environment. LSTM is one of the artificial recurrent neural network algorithms, and we figure out that it is quite suitable to predict the temperature variation based on the history of thermal fluctuation trends. We monitor the temperatures at 8 spots nearby a SPDT machine, and the neural network based on LSTM algorithm is trained to construct the thermal drift model from the time series data. Results of thermal drift prediction showed that the proposed method gives an effective model upon the well-controlled laboratory environment, and by which the thermal drift can be compensated to improve the precision of SPDT process.
A magneto-rheological finishing (MRF) process for the post-treatment of diamond turning is presented to remove the periodic micro structures and sub-surface damages with improvement of the original figure and surface roughness. An off-axis aspherical mirror with electro-less nickel-phosphorus plated surface was machined by a Single point diamond turning machine (SPDTM) and MRF polisher. The machined surfaces were examined by a scanning low-coherence interferometer, and the technique of Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) and Power Spectrum Density (PSD) were introduced to evaluate the residual diamond turning marks on the turned and polished surfaces. The turning marks, which was clearly visible on the diamond turned surface, were absolutely removed after MR process, and the surface roughness of the machined surface was improved from 6 nm(Sa) and 7 nm (Sq) to 2 nm(Sa) and 3 nm (Sq). Consequently, the experimental results indicate that MRF is suitable for removing periodic micro-patterns caused by diamond turning process with the progress of the original figure and surface roughness.
We present a profilometry for measuring aspheric surface, which determines the curvature from the sub-aperture topography along two orthogonal directions and then reconstructs the entire surface profile from the measured curvature data. The entire surface was divided into a number of sub-apertures with overlapping zones. Each sub-aperture was measured using white-light scanning interferometry to avoid any optical alignment error along an optical axis. Simulation studies are also presented based on the mathematical model. The proposed mathematical model was also experimentally tested on freeform surfaces using white-light scanning interferometry under deveolpment.
We present a method of aspheric surface reconstruction from the curvature data along two orthogonal directions. The curvature is an intrinsic property of the artifact, which does not depend on the positioning error of a measuring sensor. In this paper, we showed that the curvature method is suitable for aspheric surface reconstruction along one direction and expanded this algorithm to two directions. Computer simulations were undertaken to explore the possibility of three-dimensional surface reconstruction. The simulation results and the position error diagnosis showed that the curvature method is robust against various positioning errors.
An off-axis optical system can effectively avoid some problems, such as aberrations, shielded area created by the secondary mirror and a narrow field of view (FOV), while an on-axis optical system has the problems. Inspired by the consideration, the off-axis optical system is generally used for hyperspectral sensors and telescopes. However, there are several obstacles limiting the productivity of the off-axis optics in fabrication and measurement processes. In this study, to overcome this weakness, we suggests a new fabrication technique using a customized jig, not separated from the work-piece. A convex aspheric mirror and the off-axis mirror are fabricated by Single Point Diamond Turning Machine (SPDTM) for comparison analysis of surface state. The mirrors are made from aluminum (Al6061-T6) and used for the reflectors of a coastal water remote sensing system. We show fast machining and simple measurement in comparison with traditional off-axis single machining and measurement, provide performance results, such as form accuracy and surface roughness measured by both contact 3D profilometer (UA3P) and non-contact 3D profiler (CCI-Optics). The customized ultra-precision machining process can be effectively used for complex off-axis mirror fabricating.
The design and performance analysis of a new sensor is introduced which is on board a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for coastal water remote sensing. The top level requirements of sensor are to have at least 4cm spatial resolution at 500m operating height, and 4° field of view (FOV) and 100 signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) value at 660nm. We determined the design requirements that its entrance pupil diameter is 70mm, and F-ratio is 5.0 as an optical design requirement. The three-mirror system is designed including aspheric primary and secondary mirrors, which optical performance are 1/15 λRMS wavefront error and 0.75 MTF value at 660nm. Considering the manufacturing and assembling phase, we performed the sensitivity, tolerance, and stray-light analysis. From these analysis we confirmed this optical system, which is having 4cm spatial resolution at 500m operating height, will be applied with remote sensing researches.
In this paper, analysis of variance on designed experiments with full factorial design was applied to determine the optimized machining parameters for ultra-precision fabrication of the secondary aspheric mirror, which is one of the key elements of the space cryogenic infrared optics. A single point diamond turning machine (SPDTM, Nanotech 4μpL; Moore) was adopted to fabricate the material, AL6061-T6, and the three machining parameters of cutting speed, feed rate and depth of cut were selected. With several randomly assigned experimental conditions, surface roughness of each condition was measured by a non-contact optical profiler (NT2000; Vecco). As a result of analysis using Minitab, the optimum cutting condition was determined as following; cutting speed: 122 m/min, feed rate: 3 mm/min and depth of cut: 1 μm. Finally, a 120 mm diameter aspheric secondary mirror was attached to a particularly designed jig by using mixture of paraffin and wax and successfully fabricated under the optimum machining parameters. The profile of machined surface was measured by a high-accuracy 3-D profilometer(UA3P; Panasonic) and we obtained the geometrical errors of 30.6 nm(RMS) and 262.4 nm(PV), which satisfy the requirements of the space cryogenic infrared optics.
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