Precision Optical Quality Polishing

Standard and Custom Shapes and Sizes Available

Surface Finishes offers a full line of standard and custom optical flats and prisms for your precision measurement needs.

Whether you need a low-cost option like borosilicate glass for your production environment or a high-quality material like Quartz or Zerodur for high precision measurements and final QC, we can help you.

We also provide resurfacing and certification services traceable to NIST standards.

Cartrilamp

One of our unique offerings is the Cartrilamp™ monochromatic light source metrology tool.  This is a low-cost, dual-purpose unit that enables you to measure multiple parts at one time using an 8” to 12” flat or remove the light source and measure flatness in the optical flat on part configuration.

Typical Dimensions

Advanced Capabilities

• STANDARD REFERENCE OPTICS

  

  Standard Reference Optics

  We offer a full line of standard optical flats for use in your precision measurement applications ranging in flatness from 2 to 5 micro inches (approximately λ/4 to λ/10). For prisms, we typically control angularity to within 1 arc second.

• CUSTOM OPTICS

  

  Custom Optics

  Our custom flats can be made to measure surface flatness for virtually any design configuration.  This includes shoulders with protruding shafts necessitating a hole in the flat or a recessed pocket where the optical flat is designed to mate with the shape of the recess. Our custom prisms are also manufactured to your particular specifications.

• OPTICAL COATINGS

  We work with our partners to offer a variety of optical coatings for your flats including our Cartricoat™ high contrast coating for higher clarity viewing of light bands.

• MATERIALS OF CONSTRUCTION FOR OPTICAL FLATS

  Our flats are available in Pyrex® (borosilicate), fused quartz and Zerodur®. Pyrex is the least expensive material but it also has the highest coefficient of thermal expansion (3.2 X 10^-6 per degree K). Fused quartz is much lower (5.5 X 10^-7 ) and Zerodur is the most expensive and thermally stable (1.0 X 10^-7).

Pyrex® is a registered trademark of Corning Corporation. Zerodur® is a registered trademark of Schott AG.

• REFURBISHMENT

  If you have optical flats that are damaged with scratches or have hazy viewing conditions, we can resurface them to like-new condition, recalibrate and recertify them for you.

• CERTIFICATION

  We provide recalibration and recertification services for your optical flats. All of our work is traceable to NIST standards.