What's it about?

The VIBE™ process is a full-aperture, conformal polishing process incorporating high frequency and random motion designed to rapidly remove sub-surface damage in a VIBE pre-polish step and eliminate mid-spatial frequency (MSF) errors in a VIBE finishing step.

1. INTRODUCTION TO THE VIBE PROCESS

The Optimax VIBE process is a full-aperture, conformal polishing process incorporating high frequency and random motion designed to rapidly remove grinding damage in a VIBE pre-polish step and eliminate midspatial frequency errors created during deterministic figure correction with a VIBE finishing step.

To better understand the significance of the VIBE process, we will first briefly describe traditional optical pitch polishing. In traditional optical polishing, a pitch lap must take on the exact shape of the desired optic (see Figure 1a). If it does not match, the exact shape (see Figure 2a) the high points on the optic will be polished away causing the optic to become the shape of the polishing lap. The long polishing strokes (indicated by black arrows) associated with traditional pitch polishing exaggerate this phenomenon and make it extremely difficult to polish aspheres or non-spherical surfaces using traditional pitch polishing...