Designed in the required 50mm diameter fused silica, Optical Surfaces' Fabry Perot etalon pairs provide matching accuracies better than lambda/200 enabling the Table Stable Interferometer to maintain its competitive edge.
The spectral filtering capability is improved by reducing surface ripples and microroughness
The polishing technique developed is using conventional compounds and allows to almost eliminate surface ripples thus improving the finesse of the Fabry Perot Etalons while conserving its high performance characteristics.
Dr Aris Kouris, Sales Director of Optical Surfaces said "Many parameters including material quality, optical figure, plate parallelism and coating quality are all critical to the overall performance of a Fabry Perot etalon. To maintain the competitive edge of the Table Stable Interferometer we are continuously investigating ways of further improving the quality of the matched Etalon pairs we supply to them. Our latest development project focused on how to improve the spectral filtering capability of the Fabry Perot etalon pairs by reducing surface ripples and microroughness. Our initial investigation using chemical polishing techniques brought some improvement, but degraded the matching accuracy of the etalon pairs. As a consequence, we refocused our efforts into developing new polishing techniques using conventional compounds. The results have been excellent - the new polishing technique has allowed us to almost eliminate surface ripples thereby improving the finesse of the Fabry Perot Etalons whilst maintaining all the other high-performance characteristics".
