A development program involving the design, fabrication and testing of low-efficiency, low-absorption grating beam samplers is described. Two different basic designs were selected for development. The first design is a low-efficiency grating with a high reflectivity multi-layer dielectric coating. The second design is a "buried grating", which consists of a blazed grating under a ZnSe spacer layer, with a high reflectivity multilayer overcoat. The fabrication problems associated with each type of beam sampler are discussed. The comparison of experimentally measured absorptivity and efficiency with values obtained from computer cal-culations are presented. An additional effort currently underway to make very low absorptivity beam samplers by generating periodic refractive index variations in the dielectric stack is also discussed.

Date Published: 4 April 1979
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 0171, Optical Components: Manufacture and Evaluation, (4 April 1979); doi: 10.1117/12.957053

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 0171:
Optical Components: Manufacture and Evaluation
Donald S. Nicholson, Editor(s)