Manufacturing and Testing of Surface Modified Silicon Carbide Aspheric Mirror

The manufacturing and testing of a surface modified silicon carbide mirror with a bowl-shaped structure was introduced. The entire process flow includes pre-modification silicon carbide substrate processing, silicon carbide substrate surface modification, and silicon modified layer processing. Firstly, before the modification, the conventional processing method of silicon carbide was used, and the effect of the support form on the figure was eliminated by multiple direction rotation testing. At the same time, the self-aligned compensation cross-test was completed and the accuracy of the aspherical surface coefficient was verified. In addition, the polishing process of the silicon modified layer material was studied, and the optimum process parameters suitable for polishing the silicon modified layer material were found out. Based on the above experiments, the modified optical processing adopts a combination of two kinds of polishing technology: flexible chemical mechanical polishing (FCMP) and ion beam figuring (IBF). The surface roughness and surface finish of silicon modified layer are improved by flexible chemical mechanical polishing technology. The high figure accuracy of silicon modified layer is achieved finally by ion beam figuring technology. Finally, the final result of the mirror after IBF is: the RMS values of the figure and roughness in the phi 450 mm aperture is 0.01 lambda (lambda= 632.8 nm) and 0.52 nm. The mirror's processing results fully meet the design specifications.