Overview

Welcome to the new Boulder Optical Design Website. This update has been a long time coming, mainly because practically all of my work is repeat, or through word-of-mouth. Boulder Optical Design is dedicated to serving the optics industry with high-level scientific and technical support in optical physics. Services include thin film materials, thin film design, optical measurements, and mathematical modeling.

Measurement systems

Much of our activity is developing measurement systems. Many of these systems are highly specialized for a particular need, but these measurement systems are "standard" and of general use, especially for companies in precision opticial fabrication and thin films. Customers who use their products can also use these systems for incoming quality control.

• Broadband optical monitor system. Enjoy this optical monitor endpoint movie showing the endpoint spectra and theoretical target at the end of each layer in a long thin film deposition run.
• Automated inspection system. The automated system scans optical surfaces for defects. The user drops in the parts, and runs the application. Defects are classified and counted.
• Spatial thin film measurement system. This is for spectral measurements at spatial positions of an optical element, or a batch of optical elements. One common application is to measure coating uniformity, but the system is designed in a modular way that facilitates a wide variety of spatial measurements.
• Ringdown measurement system. Ringdown is a technique for measuring very low losses in high-Q optical cavities. It is used for environmental and gas monitoring, but the technique is also used to qualify the low-loss mirrors that go into such systems.
• Surface scattering measurement system. This measurement system is simple and effective for measuring scattering of high-quality optical surfaces. The system can be used for total scattering, or for measuring the fundamental "haziness" of a surface, excluding large and countable defects.

Some examples of services that we provide

• Design the optical system for a particle detector.
• Create or review thin film designs and/or specifications for a complex optical system.
• Determine optical parameters for a coating material, based on spectrophotometer scans and other data. Extrapolate to other wavelengths where possible.
• Design and set up an experimental measurement of the group delay dispersion (GDD, sometimes called group velocity dispersion) over a given wavelength range for an ultra-fast laser mirror.
• Design a thin film for an ultra-fast, controlled-GDD mirror.
• Determine material choices and design for applications requiring high laser damage threshold.
• Optimize coating designs for improved manufacturability.
• Design an ExtremeRangeTunableFilter, with a tuning range of over two octaves (factor of 4 in wavelength or frequency). A UV/VIS/NearIR example tunes from 322 to 1070 nm, and a mid IR example tunes from 1380 to 5580 nm.
• Modeling a complex optical system, e.g. an interferometric interleaver for telecommunications, including detailed effects of thin film designs, dimensional errors, and material dispersion.