OMI has an in-house optics coating facility. Our expertise is metallic first surface mirror coatings for ultraviolet, visible, near infrared and infrared wavelengths. We offer aluminum coatings tuned for ultraviolet and visible wavelengths, silver coating for visible to near infrared wavelengths and gold coatings for infrared wavelengths.
Click on a coating type in the following list to view a representative reflectivity curve diagram:
- Bare Aluminum For Ultraviolet-Visual
- Ultraviolet enhanced Aluminum
- Protected Aluminum For Visual
- Enhanced Aluminum for Visual
- Protected Silver for Visual-Near Infrared
- Protected Gold for Infrared
We apply reflective coatings using an Airco Temescal FCE 4800 coating machine. This fully automated coater has the following key features:
- 4-Pocket electron beam gun and Inficon IC5 controller provide excellent control of material evaporation rates and layer thickness.
- Veeco Mark II+ ion source for Ion Bombardment Assisted Deposition (IBAD) to produce dense coating layers.
- Cryogenic high vacuum pumps for fast, oil free pumping to pressures as low as 2E-6 Torr.
- Three station planetary rotation mirror holder provides excellent coating uniformity while coating up to three 20” diameter mirrors in one coating run.
- Single rotation holder for coating single mirrors up to 1.1 meter (46″) diameter.
We specialize in reflective coatings for the visible band. Our enhanced aluminum coating, IBAD-96 is an ion bombardment assisted deposition coating featuring greater than 96% average reflectivity across the visible spectrum. IBAD-96 is a durable, pin-hole free enhanced aluminum coating that will provide years of service and hold up well in astronomy observing environments
OMI uses FTG Software Film Star Thin Film Software to customize and enhance metallic coating reflectivity to specific wave bands where appropriate.
At OMI we use Angstrom Sun Technologies TFProbe SR300 Spectro Reflectometer to measure reflectivity and film thickness.