Optics Balzers (Germany)

Materion Balzers Optics has 40+ years of experience in space-based optics as well as a proven track record of providing high end CWDM coatings. With the expansion of laser communications MBO has the unique perspective, heritage, and capability to provide the broad range of coated optical components required in today’s laser communications terminals and ground stations. From high performance AR lenses to steep edge splitters MBO has in-house capability and heritage to provide TRL 9 level components.

The Copernicus Land Surface Temperature Monitoring (LSTM) mission is part of the Copernicus Sentinel Expansion Missions.It will carry a high spatial-temporal resolution thermal infrared sensor to provide observations of the landsurface temperature.The mission responds to priority requirements of the agricultural user community for improving sustainable monitoring requirements to better manage water resources and learn about yield, vegetation and crop growth.The spectral coverage in the multiple bands spans from 490nm to 1610nm for the VNIR/SWIR part of the instrument.Materion Optics Balzers was selected as responsible supplier for the VNIR/SWIR filter assemblies.This contribution addresses the design, manufacturing and characterization of the demanding dielectric optical coatings for the sophisticated band pass filters and dichroic by PARMS technology for the LSTM project by Materion Optics Balzers.

Beside homogeneous filter coatings a coating can also be applied with a linear gradient. Linear gradient or linear variable filters show a gradient of a band edge or central wavelength depending on the filter type in spectral direction and they are homogeneous in spatial direction. In this paper, we present a linear variable narrow band pass filter with full width half maximum of about 8 nm and a transmittance of more than 98% in the wavelength range of 670 nm to 780 nm. The target for the gradient is 3.3. nm/mm. Due to the need of transmittance filter and AR coating are manufactured by means of Plasma Enhanced Magnetron Sputtering (PARMS). Additionally, the linear variable filter for FLEX mission requires a black mask to separate between HR1 and HR2 channel. This mask is also applied by OBJ by means of the PARMS process and a Ti based layer stack. Here, a reflectance of <1.5% in the range of 400 nm to 800 nm can be demonstrated. The definition of black mask was done by means of photolithography.

The Sentinel 2 mission shall ensure the continuity and enhancement of Landsat and SPOT data and sustain operational land services in the frame of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative. Sentinel-2 is designed to image the Earth’s landmasses from its orbit for at least 7.25 years. The Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI), delivered by Astrium Toulouse, will provide high resolution imagery in 13 spectral channels extending from the Visible Near Infrared (VNIR, 400-1100 nm) to the Short Wave Infra-Red (SWIR, 1100-2500 nm) range, down to a resolution of 10 meters with an image width of 290 kilometers. A dichroic splitter device is located in back-focal path of the telescope. It allows splitting the incoming optical beam between VNIR and SWIR focal planes. It shall ensure an extremely high rejection, better than 1:1000, between both ranges while introducing negligible aberrations in reflected (VNIR) and transmitted (SWIR) paths. The splitter assembly consists of a wedged dichroic filter plate and a wedged compensator plate mounted in a common frame. Both plates are made of fused silica (Infrasil) and polished to lambda/40. The major challenges reside in the design complexity of the dichroic coating and in the deposition process control to ensure the required high uniformity of performances through the large aperture. The paper presents the final spectral and optical performances of this challenging sub-system. It also discusses the main difficulties that have been overpassed during the development and qualification phase.

Abstract The fabrication of high precision optical coatings has historically used evaporative deposition because of high costs and low production volumes associated with sputtering techniques. However, improvements in substrate handling and sputtering production have made sputtering more efficient.Improved handling techniques, such as load‐locked vacuum chambers, have greatly reduced coating chamber downtime. Likewise dual magnetron and advanced plasma reactive sputtering coating platforms have markedly increased filter throughput allowing the fabrication of highly complex coatings with several hundred layers designed to meet the requirements of today's cutting edge applications such as biotech and analytical instrumentation, fluorescence microscopy and advanced spectroscopy.

TEMPERATURE DEPENDENCE OF MAGNETISATION REVERSAL AND GMR IN SPIN VALVE STRUCTURES F. STOBIECKIα, T. STOBIECKIb, B. OCKER, W. MAASS c , W. POWROŹNIKb, A. PAJAd , C. LOCHe AND K. ROLL C Institute of Molecular Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences Smoluchowskiego 17, 60-179 Poznan, Poland b Department of Electronics, University of Mining and Metallurgy, Krakow, Poland cBalzers Process Systems GmbH, Alzenau, Germany dDepartment of Solid State Physics, Faculty of Physics and Nuclear Techniques University of Mining and Metallurgy, Krakow, Poland eDepartment of Physics, University of Kassel, Germany

Trends for further developments in vacuum processing of hard disks are discussed. Future tools should offer extended process capabilities such as in situ substrate cleaning, deposition of multilayer structures, fast ramping of substrate temperature, and high energy deposition. The design challenge will be to adapt these steps-many of them already used in other vacuum applications-to the 2-5 s process times common in disk manufacturing.