Optical Fabrication in the Optics Research Group

Hedser van Brug, Silvia M. Booij Optics Research Group, Delft University of Technology, Lorentzweg 1, NL-2628 CJ Delft The Netherlands (e-mail: brug@optica.tn.tudelft.nl) Robert-Jaap M. van der Bijl DeCOS, TNO/TPD, Delft, The Netherlands Oliver W. Fhnle FISBA-OPTIK AG, St. Gallen, Switzerland Introduction Within the Optics Research Group there has been, and still is an interest in optical fabrication. The group had its own optical workshop in which the experimental work could be carried out. Recently, the optical workshop has been taken over by TNO/TPD and is now operated under the name Delft Center of Optical Surfaces (DeCOS), both for production and research. The research in the field of optical fabrication is carried out within DeCOS, with coaching by staff members of the Optics Research Group. The work reported here is the result of about ten years of research. The reported research ranges from process optimization and control to the design of new types of production machines and production methods. Bowl-feed polishing The first research to be elaborated upon is bowl-feed polishing [1]. Bowlfeed polishing is also referred to as super-polishing. During bowl-feed polishing, the sample oscillates horizontally (28 strokes/min) over the rotating pitch lap, similar to conventional polishing. The basic difference with traditional (fresh-feed) polishing is the use of a bowl with a suspension of polishing compound in water, rotating with the same speed as the pitch lap. Because of the centrifugal and gravitational forces, the particles of the polishing compound in the suspension move to the perimeter and to the Stirrer Pitch lap bottom of the bowl. This is confirmed by the fact that the polishing Sample compound sinks visibly to the bottom within one hour if no obstacles are placed in the rotating bowl. For an impression of the bowl-feed configuration, see Fig.1. The super-polishing starts with a stirrer in the bowl, which provides a fairly homogeneous distribution of the polishing Polishing compound compound in the bowl. Then, a continuous deposition of new polishing in water compound occurs on the pitch lap, because the suspension flows over its Fig.1: Top and side views of the edges. If a good contact between the rotating pitch lap and the sample bowl-feed polishing instrument. surface is obtained, the stirrer is removed. Now the particles in the suspension start sinking and the amount of polishing compound arriving on the pitch lap decreases gradually until finally only pure water flows over the lap. Since the compound particles are broken and pushed into the pitch during polishing, the surface of the pitch lap becomes increasingly smoother. In its turn, this smooth lap surface extremely reduces the sample surface roughness. The setup used to characterize the sample roughness was a modified Linnik interference microscope. Using this setup we arrived at an accuracy of 0.02 nm. The starting surface roughness was about 0.5 nm (RMS) and this roughness was reduced to 0.15 nm (RMS) by bowl-feed polishing.

FAUST and WAGNER In this section two new asphere production methods will be Curve discussed. Starting with the zc xc description of a rotationally Pm Pm f symmetric surface shape to be generated, it is possible to x 1 P calculate the intersection curve of t -4 -2 2 4 P yr that shape with a plane, see Fig.2. rm This plane has to pass through the -1 yc y minimum and maximum radial a) b) position to be present in the Fig.2: A schematic representation of the FAUST and WAGNER methods. surface. The idea is now to create In a) the surface and the intersecting plane are indicated in 3D view where a tool that machines an optical in b) a cross section is shown. The smallest and largest radial positions are surface along this intersection given. curve. At the end of the machining the shape of the optical surface will then be the desired one. If the machining is carried out with a linecontact (a machining band), the method is called FAUST [2,3]: Fabrication of Aspheric Ultra-precise Surfaces using a Tube. If on the other hand point contact machining is employed, the method is called WAGNER [4,5]: Wear-based Aspherics Generator based on a Novel Elliptical Rotator. Since within the FAUST method the machining is carried out along a line contact, the orientation of the contact line between the machining band and the surface determines the shape of the surface being generated. Within WAGNER a stop has to be included in the machine to stop the machining as soon as the desired removal has been obtained. Owing to this stop, the differences in removal rate for different radial positions on the surface will not be a problem. By using FAUST of WAGNER the problem of producing high accuracy aspherical surfaces is shifted to the problem to produce an accurate path along which the machining takes place. The required accuracy of the machining path is less stringent than that of the optical surface owing to the advantageous error propagation factor between machining path errors and surface shape errors. The same tool, shaped in the form of the intersection curve, can be used to produce differently shaped surfaces by changing the angle under which it is positioned above the surface. Within the WAGNER setup we use only elliptical tool paths. It has been shown that by using an elliptical tool-path, all types of conical surfaces can be produced. Both FAUST and WAGNER can be used to produce on-axis as well as offNozzle axis surfaces and they use loose abrasive load controlled machining. Within WAGNER the point contact consists of a small cup wheel Sample placed under an angle such that effectively the wheel makes a small Pump area contact with the workpiece. First results with WAGNER showed Spindle an rms roughness values of below 5 nm. The FAUST setup is presently under construction and the first results are expected by the end of the year 2000.
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Fluid Jet Polishing Recently, a new shaping and finishing technique has been introduced. This technique is referred to as Fluid Jet Polishing (FJP) [6,7]. On one hand we knew the principle behind bowl-feed polishing and on the other hand we knew that it is possible to cut glass and metal with highpressure abrasive slurry jets. This gave us the idea to investigate the use of a low-pressure abrasive slurry jet to shape and finish optical

Fig. 3: The FJP setup, comprising of a tank (containing the slurry), a stirrer, a pump, a nozzle and a glass sample on a spindle.

surfaces. Using a simple membrane pump (0 10 bar) we pump the slurry of water and abrasive particles from a tank and guide it through a nozzle to the surface, see Fig.3. There the fluid jet is, after hitting the surface, forced to flow laterally to the surface such that the particles apply a shear force to the surface. This results in a ductile removal of material. A 1 mm diameter nozzle results in a 3 mm spot size where material is being removed. Starting with a rough surface (rms roughness of 300 nm) it was found that the surface gets smoother by the FJP process (typical end roughness of 5 15 nm rms) and that the removal rate is about 3m/min. If a smooth surface is processed, it was found that the surface finish was maintained (no degradation), and that the removal rate is lower by about a factor of ten as compared to a rough starting surface. The main features of FJP are its in process cooling and debris removal, the re-use of slurry and thereby low environmental pollution and low production cost (low consumables consumption), and its simple setup. It can be used to process all types of materials (plastics, ceramics, metals, and crystals) and with a proper computer control it can be used to shape all kinds of surfaces. iTIRM
Scattering The acronym iTIRM Pad stands for intensityDetector Laser beam detecting total internal reflection microscopy [8]. The idea behind iTIRM originates from total internal reflection microscopy (TIRM), Fig. 4: iTIRM setup and measurement result (see text). where light illuminates the surface from within under an angle exceeding the angle of total reflection, and a microscope is used to inspect the surface, from above. There where defects are present, light will be scattered and will show up in the microscope image. All defects free areas will remain dark since the light will be totally reflected. We have extended this method such that it can be used for in-process monitoring. During processing the microscope can not be positioned above the surface. Therefore we decided to use the reflected light intensity as an indicator of defects and/or state of roughness on the surface. It has recently been shown that iTIRM can be used for process investigation (optimization purposes) and for in-process monitoring as watch-dog for process errors and as indicator for the end of process. Figure 4 shows the iTIRM setup (as used for in-process measurements) together with some results from a polishing experiment. It can clearly be seen that the iTIRM signal increases with time, indicating a decreasing roughness. With time the increase gets less until it finally levels out, indicating that the end result of this polishing step has been reached. The sudden drop in intensity in the left-hand-side result is caused by insufficient lubrication which shows that iTIRM is well suited as process monitor.

Nomarski In many optical workshops a Nomarski microscope is used as a quick tool to qualitatively investigate the status of a surface. Our idea was to take the histogram of the Nomarski images to get more quantitative information on the surface quality [9]. A histogram gives information on how often a given gray value is present in an image. For a perfectly smooth surface the Nomarski image should contain only one single gray value. For surfaces that contain some roughness, the histograms of the Nomarski images show a peak with a certain width. It is expected for the peak width to be linked to the rms surface roughness. Since a Nomarski microscope compares two adjacent points on the surface (shearing interferometry), the gray value in the image is linked to the slope in the surface. In Fig.5 an example is given of a Nomarski image taken from a sample that contains tool marks. From this Nomarski image the histogram was taken and converted from gray values to corresponding slope values. A broad structure can be seen

with two clear sub-peaks. These peaks indicate the presence of tool-marks. Tool-marks will in general be present as lines or steps in the surface. This leads to the presence in the Nomarski images of many points having one of two gray values, one gray value for the up-going slope, and one for the down-going slope.
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a) b) Fig. 5: Nomarski image of a surface showing tool marks and its histogram. The double peaked structure in b) indicates the tool marks. Conclusions The investigations within the Optics Research Group, in the field of optical fabrication, have been shown to be very divers. It consists work in the field of shaping (FAUST, WAGNER, and FJP), finishing (Bowl-feed polishing and FJP), and characterization (iTIRM, Nomarski microscopy, and Linnik microscopy). The authors like to thank the co-workers in the Optical Workshop: Rosindro Partosoebroto, Rob Kuiper and Bob den Dulk. References [1] Johannes van Wingerden, Hans J. Frankena, and Bertram A. van der Zwam, Production and measurement of superpolished surfaces, Optical Engineering 31(5), pp. 1086 1092 [2] O. W. Fhnle, H. van Brug, C. J. van der Laan, and H. J. Frankena, Loose abrasive line-contact machining of aspherical optical surfaces of revolution, Applied Optics 36(19), pp. 4483 4489 [3] O. W. Fhnle, H. van Brug, C. J. van der Laan, and H. J. Frankena, Generation of on-axis and off-axis conic surfaces of revolution by applying a tubular tool, Applied Optics 36(19), pp. 4490 4496 [4] Oliver W. Fhnle, Hedser van Brug, and Hans J. Frankena, Wear-based aspherics generator based on a novel elliptical rotator, Optical Engineering 37(8), pp. 2343 2350 [5] Hedser van Brug and Oliver W. Fhnle, WAGNER: machine construction and operation considerations, in Optical Fabrication and Testing, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, Washington DC, 2000), pp. 122 124 [6] Oliver W. Fhnle, Hedser van Brug, and Hans J. Frankena, Fluid Jet Polishing of Optical Surfaces, Applied Optics 37(28), pp. 6771 6773 [7] Silvia M. Booij, Hedser van Brug, and Oliver W. Fhnle, A mathematical model for machining spot in Fluid Jet Polishing, in Optical Fabrication and Testing, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, Washington DC, 2000), pp. 70 72 [8] Robert-Jaap M. van der Bijl, Oliver W. Fhnle, and Hedser van Brug, Subsurface damage measurements as a tool for process monitoring, in Proceedings of the ASPE 1999 Annual Meeting (American Society for Precision Engineering, Raleigh, NC 1999), pp. 606 609 [9] Hedser van Brug, Silvia M. Booij, Oliver W. Fhnle, and Robert-Jaap M. van der Bijl, Quantitative surface characterization using a Nomarski microscope, in Optical Fabrication and Testing, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, Washington DC, 2000), pp. 91 93