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News Release from: Optical Surfaces | Subject: Off-axis parabolic mirrors
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 06 October 2006
Mirrors boast achromatic performance
High precision off-axis parabolic mirrors suit applications including high power laser focusing, beam expansion, MRTD testing and bore sight alignment for missile guidance systems.
Optical Surfaces is one of the world's leading suppliers of high precision off-axis parabolic mirrors for applications including high power laser focusing, focusing on astronomical objects, collimating reference wavefronts, beam expansion, MTF measurement, MRTD testing and bore sight alignment for missile guidance systems Typical specifications achieved by Optical Surfaces' highly experienced and skilled team of engineers and craftsmen include off-axis parabola up to 600mm in diameter with surface accuracies to lambda/20 p-v depending on off-axis angles
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 5 Apr 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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With 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 on aspherics of 1nm RMS.
A range of coatings is available for standard and custom components from metallic with or without protective overcoat to multilayer dielectrics and ultrahard coatings.
Parabolic mirrors are the most common type of aspherical mirrors 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 minimising the weight of a design.
They are especially suitable for broadband or multiple wavelength applications due to their completely achromatic performance.
All together these advantages produce a cost-effective solution for many optical design problems with no compromise in performance.
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