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Piezo power puts mirrors in their place

A PI (Physik Instrumente) product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team May 6, 2004

The latest addition to the PI range of ultrafast piezo-driven mirror scanners features an optical deflection range of 6 degrees - claimed as a world record for piezo scanners.

PI provides a variety of ultrafast piezo-driven mirror scanners.

Lately, a new device with an optical deflection range of 6 degrees (world record for piezo scanners) has been added to the spectrum.

Piezo steering mirrors are driven by high-performance piezoceramic actuators providing much higher forces than magnetic actuators and acceleration to 10,000g.

This makes them ideal for fast image correction applications even with large mirrors of 4 to 12in diameter.

For minimum friction and maximum guiding precision and lifetime, frictionless flexures are integrated in the system to control the trajectory of the mirror.

Position sensors feed the exact position information back to a piezo controller and allow for angular resolution down to the nano-radian realm.

Piezo steering mirrors have three advantages over the widely used galvo scanners: they are smaller, have higher scanning frequencies (in the kilohertz range) and achieve better linearity in two-axis scanning arrangements, because they feature a common pivot point, with only one moving mirror.

Typical applications include: multi-axis laser beam scanning, fast beam steering, resolution enhancement, image dithering and stabilisation, scanning microscopy, compensation of errors in optics, semiconductor test and measurement equipment, metrology, and optical telecommunication.

Find out more about this article. Request a brochure, download technical specifications and request samples here.

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