Optical Surfaces Ltd is supplying high precision off-axis parabolic mirrors (120 – 350 mm diameter) to OPTIKOS Corporation (Wakefield, USA) for their customer specified OpTest® optical testing systems.
Off-axis parabolic mirror with low slope error. Image Credit: Optical Surfaces Ltd.
The main challenge in manufacturing these high precision mirrors is associated with their very demanding slope errors. Typically, such errors for the supplied off-axis parabolic mirrors must be very low (lambda/20 P-V / cm) and particularly good around the centre. The latter performance specification, allows labs to use the instruments manufactured by OPTIKOS for a wide range of sizes in a reliable manner, since the very high quality of the mirrors near the centre enables users to test optics reliably even when the aperture of these lenses is quite small. As such, labs can use OPTIKOS instruments to reliably test optics that could start with as little as 30 mm in diameter and up to the full aperture that each individual off-axis parabolic mirror allows.
Director of Operations at OPTIKOS Corporation – Dennis Fantone commented “When sourcing key components for our instruments, it is important to trust and collaborate with suppliers that have a good understanding of our customer’s needs and can translate this into reliably producing top quality optics. The state-of-the-art off-axis parabolic mirrors that Optical Surfaces manufactures for us helps extend the capabilities of our advanced optical testing instruments”.
Founded in 1982, OPTIKOS Corporation is a leader and pioneer in lens and image testing, and their products and systems are based on over forty years of experience and innovations in optical engineering. While other suppliers compromise by manufacturing their systems around off-the-shelf components, OPTIKOS OpTest® systems are composed almost completely of custom optics, mechanics, and electronics designed solely for the purpose of lens testing. The modular components of OPTIKOS OpTest® systems allows them to be configured to test a wide variety of VIS, NIR, SWIR, MWIR and LWIR lenses.
Over the last 60 years - Optical Surfaces has established itself as a world leading producer of high precision off-axis parabolic mirrors. Benefiting from a highly skilled team of engineers and craftsmen, and a uniquely stable manufacturing environment, the company can routinely produce OAP mirrors with surface accuracy to lambda/20 (peak-to-valley) depending upon off-axis angles. Using proprietary polishing techniques Optical Surfaces can, depending on the surface accuracy required, achieve the natural limit to the off-axis angle of around 25-30 degrees and surface micro-roughness of less than 1 nm. A range of coatings is available for standard and custom components from metallic with or without protective overcoat to multilayer dielectrics and ultra-hard coatings.