Edmund Optics (Barrington, NJ) has increased the company’s capacity to make complex coatings with more than 100 layers by adding a new 45-in. diameter Vacuum Process Technology coating chamber. The coatings can be applied to many categories of catalog parts, including polarizers, laser mirrors, short wave pass and long wave pass filters, beamsplitters, and dichroic color filters, as well as custom optics that require specialized multilayer coatings. The VPT coating chamber is equipped with two electron guns (E-guns) and planetary rotation. It also has a high-output ion gun, which produces shift-free coatings with tolerances of less than ±1 percent. The chamber can predict and execute layer termination using either quartz-crystal numbers or transmission values calculated from curve-fitting algorithms matched to the measured optical monitor values.

Topics:
Coatings & Adhesives Photonics
Magazine cover
Photonics Tech Briefs Magazine

This article first appeared in the March, 2006 issue of Photonics Tech Briefs Magazine (Vol. 30 No. 3).

Read more articles from the archives here.