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Fabrication of ultrahigh-precision hemispherical mirrors for quantum-optics applications
Daniel B Higginbottom1,2, Geoff T Campbell3, Gabriel Araneda4
1Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Research School of Physics and Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia. daniel.higginbottom@anu.edu.au.
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 λ/50 for visible optics.
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