Advanced Materials and Services for Optical Applications

CoorsTek offers Sintered Silicon Carbide (SiC) optical mirrors for space-based and ground-based astronomy and defense applications. Sintered SiC is ideal material for numerous optical applications due to its very high specific stiffness, very high thermal conductivity, and low coefficient of thermal expansion.

Our sintered SiC is also compatible with most optical coatings commonly used on glass optics. Our manufacturing technology allows for highly light-weighted mirrors to under 10 kg/m2. We have achieved better the 1/10 wave (632 nm) figures and less than 2 Angstrom surface roughness.

• Steve Williams, Pierre Deny, “Overview of the production of sintered SiC optics and optical sub-assemblies,” The International Society for Optical Engineering , August, 2005. Copy of submitted article.
• David A Bath, David Spain, Eric Ness, Steve Williams, Michel Bougoin, “Evaluation of segmented and brazed mirror assemblies,” The International Society for Optical Engineering , July, 2005. Copy of submitted article.
• Sherry Robinson, “Nifty New Optics Technologies,” Innovation: America's Journal of Technology Commercialization , December, 2006. Link to magazine article.