Fabrication of ultrahigh-precision hemispherical mirrors for quantum-optics applications

Date

2018-01-09

Authors

Higginbottom, Daniel
Campbell, Geoff
Araneda, G.
Fang, Fengzhou
Colombe, Yves
Buchler, Ben
Lam, Ping Koy

Journal Title

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Volume Title

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Abstract

High precision, high numerical aperture mirrors are desirable for mediating strong atom-light coupling in quantum optics applications and can also serve as important reference surfaces for optical metrology. In this work we demonstrate the fabrication of highly-precise hemispheric mirrors with numerical aperture NA = 0.996. The mirrors were fabricated from aluminum by single-point diamond turning using a stable ultra-precision lathe calibrated with an in-situ white-light interferometer. Our mirrors have a diameter of 25 mm and were characterized using a combination of wide-angle single-shot and small-angle stitched multi-shot interferometry. The measurements show root-mean-square (RMS) form errors consistently below 25 nm. The smoothest of our mirrors has a RMS error of 14 nm and a peak-to-valley (PV) error of 88 nm, which corresponds to a form accuracy of lambda/50 for visible optics.

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Citation

Source

Scientific Reports

Type

Journal article

Book Title

Entity type

Access Statement

Open Access

License Rights

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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