Custom Off-Axis Paraboloids

Optical Surfaces Ltd.

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ENLEY, England, April 18, 2011 — Optical Surfaces Ltd. can typically produce off-axis parabolic mirrors up to 600 mm in diameter with surface accuracies to λ/20 peak to valley, depending upon off-axis angles.

With proprietary polishing techniques, the company can, depending upon the surface accuracy required, achieve the natural limit to the off-axis angle of around 25° to 30° and surface micro-roughness on aspherics of ~1 nm rms. Coatings are available for standard and custom components from metallic with or without protective overcoat, to multilayer dielectrics and ultrahard coatings.

Applications include high-power laser focusing, focusing upon astronomical objects, collimating reference wavefronts, beam expansion, median time to failure measurement, minimum resolvable temperature difference testing and bore sight alignment for missile guidance systems.

Parabolic mirrors are the most common type of aspheric used in optical instruments. They are free from spherical aberrations and thus focus a parallel beam to a point or a point source to infinity. Off-axis parabolic mirrors provide an unobstructed aperture allowing complete access to the focal region as well as reducing the size and minimizing the weight of a design. They are suitable for broadband or multiple-wavelength applications due to their achromatic performance.

Production approved to ISO 9001-2000, the off-axis parabolic mirrors feature a quality that is ensured using a range of interferometric and surface test measurements on all optics and optical systems leaving the factory.

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Published: April 2011