Hossein Shahinian, Mohammed Hassan, Harish Cherukuri, and B. Mullany
Conference: 32nd ASPE Annual Meeting, At Charlotte, NC
In this article, research on novel fiber based polishing tools is presented. The motivation for developing such tools, was to provide tooling capable of reducing mid-spatial frequency (MSF) errors on precision freeform and aspherical optics. MSF errors for most optical applications can be best described as periodic features with a spatial wavelength of 2 mm to 0.08 mm. The errors promote the scatter of light in a relatively small angle regime causing stray light and the appearance of flare on images produced by optics containing them [1-3]. MSF errors on precision optics are inevitable, given they are typically produced by sub aperture manufacturing technologies. Minimization of MSF errors to meet costumers specifications induces significant additional processing and cost for the fabricators, [4, 5]. Yet, solutions for MSF error reduction are very limited and incremental [6].