The mirrors used in high energy laser systems have at least two requirements that are uncommon in optical engineering: the reflectance of such mirrors must be very high (> 0.999), and the level of aberrations introduced by the mirrors is desired to be very low, typically λ/50 peak at 3.8 μ. The first requirement can be met by using multilayer thin film coatings, but such coatings can themselves produce aberrations in an optical system. One possible effect in multilayers is that such coatings produce an optical phase change on reflection that varies with angle of incidence and polarization of the illuminating beam. On a strongly curved mirror, such as an f/1.5 parabola used as a collimator, these effects may be appreciable for some coatings (e.g., λ/13 for a broadband all-dielectric reflector), but for an enhanced silver coating the effects are small, typically λ/400 of error that is almost entirely in the form of a small focus shift. If this same parabola is tested at its center of curvature, the coating-caused aberration due to angle of incidence effects are nearly zero (e.g., λ/50,000 for the broadband reflector that gave λ/13 when the parabola was used as a collimator). The wavefront errors due to coating nonuniformities are usually more important than angle of incidence effects. The simplest type of coating nonuniformity to analyze is a proportional error, i.e., an error where the ratios of the thicknesses of the layers are fixed but the thin film stack varies in total thickness across a surface. For a six-layer enhanced reflector for use at 3.8 μ, a 1% thickness error produces an approximate λ/100 wavefront error. At visible wavelengths, however, the aberration produced by such a coating error can be very different because of the optical interference nature of the coating. Means may be developed to estimate the performance of such an infrared reflector from measurements at visible wavelengths. If the errors produced by the coating are to be distinguished from those existing in the test due to misalignment or gravitational flexure of a large mirror, two or more wavelengths must be chosen. There are ambiguities in such a test that may be resolved by choice of an appropriate coating design or by using enough wavelengths in the visible, and both means have been studied. A technique was found where the infrared wavefront can be determined for a coating with proportional thickness errors if the coating prescription is known: interferograms of the mirror are made at three visible wavelengths, and the IR wavefront error due to the coating error is determined in a way that is insensitive to any errors caused by distortion of the substrate or even fairly large misalignments in the optical test of a mirror's figure.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/281959 |
| Date | January 1981 |
| Creators | Knowlden, Robert Edward |
| Contributors | Shannon, Robert |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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