Abstract
Atmospheric pressure plasma jet machining technology provides a flexible and efficient way to fabricate precise freeform optics. Due to the pure chemical material removal mechanism based on a dry etching process using fluorine containing gas, the choice of materials that can be treated is limited. Fused silica, Si, SiC or ULE® are easy to machine since the etching products formed are solely volatile. Recently, plasma jet machining has been also adopted to treat optical glasses like N-BK7® which contain amongst others alkali metals that form a solid residual layer during etching. In the paper a new approach to apply deterministic plasma jet etching on optical glass coping with complex etch characteristics caused by the residual layer is introduced.
Highlights
Current developments in the field of modern optics are aimed at miniaturization, quality improvement and reduction of the assembly effort for optical systems, for example by increasing the complexity of the optical functional surfaces used
Plasma jet machining has been adopted to treat optical glasses like N-BK7® which contain amongst others alkali metals that form a solid residual layer during etching
In the paper a new approach to apply deterministic plasma jet etching on optical glass coping with complex etch characteristics caused by the residual layer is introduced
Summary
Current developments in the field of modern optics are aimed at miniaturization, quality improvement and reduction of the assembly effort for optical systems, for example by increasing the complexity of the optical functional surfaces used. The flexible and efficient production of precise optical freeform surfaces is a major challenge. In order to achieve high-precision surfaces correction and finishing techniques are applied. A challenge is to achieve a sufficiently high removal rate to eliminate sub-surface damage (SSD) while maintaining the form after the shaping process, which is usually already within the specification range. Beam based techniques such as ion beam figuring potentially yield ultra-high precision on surfaces but the removal rates are very low and costly vacuum equipment is necessary. As an alternative plasma jet machining was introduced that provides a flexible and efficient way to fabricate precise freeform optics at atmospheric pressure using inexpensive equipment [1]
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