Diamond shifting cutting of hexagonal cube corner retroreflectors

Abstract

Hexagonal cube corner retroreflectors (HCCRs) are optical elements with high reflectivity. However, it is a discontinuous structure, and the conventional diamond cutting was considered infeasible to fabricate HCCRs. Therefore, a new machining method, Diamond Shifting Cutting (DSC), was proposed as a viable option for fabricating HCCRs. In this paper, the mechanism of DSC was described. The cutting experiments were performed for different structure sizes (50, 80, 500, and 1650 μm). Experimental results show that DSC is feasible to fabricate HCCRs with optical surface and almost sub-micrometer form accuracy. In particular, the developed method can improve the machining efficiency by at least 3 times compared to the previously proposed method.