Fluid jet polishing of optical surfaces.

We present a new finishing process that is capable of locally shaping and polishing optical surfaces of complex shapes. A fluid jet system is used to guide a premixed slurry at pressures less than 6 bars to the optical surface. We used a slurry comprising water and 10% #800 SiC abrasives (21.

Testing aspheric surfaces: simple method with a circular stop.

As an extension of the knife-edge test, a noninterferometric method for inspecting circularly symmetric aspheres is proposed in which the test surface is illuminated by a spherical wave. When a small circular stop is placed around the curvature center of the best-fitting sphere, only rays characteristic for the deviation from a perfect sphere remain unobstructed. An image of the tested surface is thereby obtained, showing light and dark regions whose boundaries are correlated to the surface profile, the stop size, and the stop position along the symmetry axis.

Polarization phase stepping with a savart element.

The imaging properties of a real-time shearing interferometer are presented. The use of Savart elements, both as a beam displacer and an analyzer in a polarization phase-stepping scheme, is demonstrated in a real-time, two-camera, four-bucket shearing interferometer. A simple calculation scheme for ray propagation through uniaxial, birefringent elements is presented, and the effects on the image formation through 6-cm-long Savart elements is discussed.

Generation of on-axis and off-axis conic surfaces of revolution by applying a tubular tool.

A new technique, fabrication of aspherical ultraprecise surfaces using a tube, is applied to the generation of conic surfaces of revolution, which also demonstrates that it is possible to generate different kinds of surfaces with the same tube. Surfaces are considered that are generated with the same tube with an elliptical edge but with different off-axis distances and different angles between the tube and the surface. Subsequently it is shown that the generated surface is always a radial section of a conic surface.

Loose abrasive line-contact machining of aspherical optical surfaces of revolution.

A new fabrication technique for the generation of optical aspherical surfaces of revolution is presented. This fabrication technique combines the characteristics of conventional loose abrasive machining with features of high-precision machining tools. A prototype of the machine tool based on this fabrication technique is currently being developed.