Magic mirror on the wall who is the fairest one of all?.
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While this guide wont provide the answer to the Queens question in Disneys classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it will give you a glimpse of the optical mirrors available on the market and help you select the best one to suit your needs.
An optical mirror is a precision optics component made of a optical polished substrate material and a high reflection coating. It can be of various shape and dimensions from less than a millimeter to several meters.
Optical mirrors are found in all the Photonics applications : in astronomy inside every telescope, in lasers by design, in vision equipment, and most of the optical assemblies systems. While their usage is quite simple : reflect the light, their range of application is wide, from UV to IR it can be used to transmit light with a change of direction, to focus light (for example in a Cassegrain telescope) or pumping light in a laser.
Under the name mirror are many different types of precision optics that may be sorted as one of below type :
Mirrors substrate material are usually selected for their good shape resistance to temperatures changes, easiness of coating to bound with it and easiness of polishing to guaranty a good polishing shape. For some high power laser applications, substrate can also be the in LIDT constraint and therefore be selected carefully.
Below table shows most common substrate material for mirror blanks :
Substrate material Remarks Float Very cheap material that comes with acceptable polishing and flatness level for low requirement applications. Fused silica Resistant material with good optical machining properties, very commonly used. N-BK7 / H-K9L Most common optical glass, can be used for high requirement surface aspects. Zerodur Material almost non affected by low temperature, used mainly for space applications. Metals Polished aluminium or brass can be used for some high power laser applications, they are also easier to machined than glass type material and mechanicaly stronger. Plastics Plastic substrates are used in optical applications, but the difficulty to keep a good surface quality and the easy wearing of the parts due to outside environment limit its usage, while this remain the cheapest substrate material.Remark : for some applications where mirrors maybe of important dimensions and the part weight is an important constraint like in space industry for example, a lightening of the part can be done with a structuring of the back of the substrate.
The most important part of an optical mirror is its high reflection coating, it is that coating that will be at the interface of incident beam and reflect it to an orthogonal direction.
With the improvement of vacuum deposition equipment in the last 30 years, layer of dielectric material can be deposit of substrates with a nanometric precision.
The material and the thickness used for each layer enable the trimming of a broadband of wavelengths where the incident beam will be reflected.
It has to be noted that the reflection of such mirror degrades as the AOI increases.
*Metal coatings are protected with SiO2 layers in order to avoid corrosion.
**An additional Chromium layer is usually added between the substrate and the metal to improve adhesion.
The critical specification for optical mirrors to be used in laser applications is their LIDT (Laser Induced Damage Threshold, or in short Damage Threshold).
This specification often measure in J/cm2 defines the energy that can be accepted by a surface area. (for reminder Watts are defining a power so values in Watts should be integrated in the time to be translated to energy).
LIDT should be defined with detail of the type of reference laser : CW or pulse laser, pulse duration, frequency and power.
Usually the coating is the contraint before the substrate, but for high power laser substrate can be wear by laser usage too. The lower the polishing and the higher of impurities in the material will bring to lower LIDT of the substrates.
Deformable mirrors are active optics elements used in adaptative optics. They are typically made of an optical membrane, actuators and an electronic controller.
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Their main usage is compensating aberrations, from example of the atmosphère in astronomy, of the eye in ophthalmology or of the cells water in biomicroscopy.
Main suppliers of deformable mirrors are ALPAO and ISP-System for high power applications.
What are Hot mirrors and cold mirrors ? It is rather intuitive (while sometimes confusing) :
In a nutshell : Hot mirrors reflect warmth, cold mirrors reflect cold signal.
They are used to separate visible to IR parts of an optical signal.
Like most optical components optical mirrors are bought from precision optics manufacturers & distributors. It is rather common that the substrate and the coating are made in two different site, therefore buying mirror blank and doing the coating in-house or subcontracting it to other supplier is common practice.
Dont hesitate to contact SINOPTIX for your questions about optical mirrors or to request for a quote.
An optical lens is a visual element made of transparent materials (such as glass, crystal, etc.), which will affect the curvature of the wavefront of light. It is a device that can converge or disperse light, and the resulting images have real and virtual images. It is widely used in various fields such as security, car loans, digital cameras, lasers, and optical instruments.
Optical lenses include various common colorless optical glasses made of fused silica, calcium fluoride, magnesium fluoride, silicon, germanium, zinc selenide, and other materials. It includes plano-convex lenses, bi-convex lenses, plano-concave lenses, and bi-concave lenses of various wavelengths, super hemispherical lenses, small spherical lenses, and meniscus lenses, cylindrical lenses, rod lens, cemented lenses, etc.
1. The lens is represented by a lens symbol (a line segment has two V-shaped signs at both ends), draw the central optical axis, and mark the optical center and focus. According to the intersection of the two refracted rays of the three special rays of the lens (generally the rays passing through the optical center and the rays parallel to the main optical axis are better), the characteristics of the image formed by the lens (such as virtual and solid image, size, forward and backward, etc.).
2. When the cylindrical optical lens is imaging, all the light emitted by each point on the object hits the lens and is imaged at the same position. Blocking a part does not affect the imaging of other light rays to the lens, so you can still see intact. However, the image's brightness on the screen will become darker due to the decrease of the light incident on the image.
3. Looking at a clock outside of the double focal length through a convex lens, the image of the second hand still rotates clockwise because it is an inverted actual image at this time, and it is still the average direction when viewed backward, so it still rotates clockwise.
Ecootik is one of the leading optical mirror manufacturers that provide customized optical mirrors. We sell coated optical mirrors of metal (aluminum, silver, gold) coatings and dielectric coatings. It is widely used in laser, scanning, and optical measurement systems. Ecootik can provide various optical mirrors and customized optical mirrors, such as scanning mirrors, AI mirrors, AU mirrors, front surface mirrors, and dielectric mirrors. For more information, please feel free to contact ECOPTIK.
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