Optical Surfaces Ltd. has received a follow-on order from the Scottish Centre for the Application of Plasma-based Accelerators (SCAPA) at the University of Strathclyde (UK), for two ultra-high performance off-axis parabolic mirrors.   These new mirrors will be deployed in a state-of-the-art laser-driven proton and ion beam accelerator on campus. The newly procured off-axis parabolic mirrors, supplied by Optical Surfaces, are short focal length (210 mm) optics dedicated to enabling...

Optical Surfaces Ltd. has pioneered a pitch-polishing technique, that produces consistently low surface microroughness on off-axis parabolic mirrors used as key focusing elements for high power laser experiments. Microroughness is a component of surface texture, it can be determined by looking at deviations from the mean line profile of a mirror surface. Several renowned plasma physics groups have reported that as microroughness becomes more pronounced, it causes effects akin to mild...

Dichroic beamsplitters from Optical Surfaces Ltd are commonly used as light guiding optics in telescope spectrographs and to enable multichannel CCD cameras to simultaneously acquire images in different colours. Beamsplitters operate by dividing an incident beam of light into two parts. One part is transmitted through the beamsplitter, the other is reflected. In a dichroic beamsplitter the light is either reflected or transmitted based on wavelength. By varying the coating on a dichroic...

Optical Surfaces Ltd report supply of fourteen 100mm diameter field selector mirrors and a 400mm diameter reference flat to TNO (Delft, Netherlands) for a Laser Launch System designed to improve telescope vision with artificial guide stars. Designed and built by ESO - the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) are some of the world's most advanced optical telescopes that form the flagship facility for European ground-based astronomy. These huge telescopes require an...

Optical Surfaces Ltd is a leading producer of large diameter aspheric lenses used as critical focusing optics in high-power laser research. Aspheric lenses provide a cost-effective way of reducing the number of optical elements in a focusing system thereby making them ideal for low f-number, high throughput laser applications. Beneficially also a correctly formed aspheric lens surface may cancel or control spherical aberration. As a result, more laser energy can be concentrated into a smaller...