16 Feb 2012 REO, a leading manufacturer of high volume precision optical solutions, now offers a range of diamond turned, aspheric mirrors, including off-axis parabolas, fabricated from either aluminum or copper substrates. These mirrors can be produced in sizes up to 12 inches (300 mm), with virtually any aspheric profile, including both rotationally and non-rotationally symmetric (e.g. cylindrically aspheric and toroidal) curves. REO’s state of the art testing and fabrication protocols ensure extremely accurate figure (surface form) for these products, with sag deviation accuracies as low as ½ fringe. These reflective optics are available with a choice of various metallic and dielectric enhanced metallic coatings, such as gold, solderable gold, protected silver, aluminum and enhanced aluminum. Furthermore, REO can produce these thin films using traditional evaporative methods, as well as ion beam sputtering (IBS), the latter technique generally delivering denser and more environmentally stable coatings. In addition, REO’s vertically integrated fabrication capabilities, together with the company’s large coating capacity, enable them to support high production volumes with industry leading cycle times.
Aspheric metal mirrors, and especially off-axis parabolas, are often used in infrared imaging and military target designation systems typically operating in the mid-IR (3 – 5 µm) or thermal imaging (12 µm) bands. In these applications, they allow designers to reduce total component count and diameter, thus offering savings in both cost and package size. Moreover, REO can readily produce mechanical mounting features directly on the part that are registered to the optical surface with a high degree of precision. Integrating mounting functionality within the part also helps reduces package size, and even enables these optics to be dropped into assemblies with minimal additional optical alignment, thus further reducing production costs and cycle times for the system integrator.
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