Optical Surfaces Completes Order for The Table Stable

Optical component developer Optical Surfaces Ltd. has announced receipt of an order for precisely matched etalon pairs from active vibration isolation technology developer The Table Stable Ltd. for use as a key component in their ultrahigh-resolution JRS series interferometers.

Operating in a uniquely stable manufacturing environment, it is possible to produce the 50-mm diameter fused silica etalons pairs for Table Stable with matching accuracies of >λ/200. Etalon manufacture places extreme demands on a company’s production capabilities. Material purity, optical figure, plate parallelism, plus surface, spacer and coating quality are all critical to the overall performance of an etalon.

"We have worked closely with Optical Surfaces for a long time and have been very pleased with the quality of the matched etalon pairs they supply to us,” said John Sandercock, managing director of Table Stable. “When hard dielectric coatings are deposited on the substrates, differential expansion causes surface strains, which distort the surface. We have developed a procedure in cooperation with Optical Surfaces to compensate these forces and so obtain hard-coated etalons with surface quality of λ/200 or better.”

Optical Surfaces develops large optics, beam expanders, collimators, prototypes, custom systems and optics. The Table Stable develops active vibration isolation and high-resolution, high-contrast spectroscopy technologies.