Damage Testing in Optics Production and Procurement

Laser-induced damage studies reported at these symposia have emphasized basic understanding of the light-matter interaction physics, and development of new, more durable materials and coatings. This paper reports a parallel trend toward routine use of damage testing in the procurement and production of reliable optics for low energy, high peak power military and commercial laser systems. Materials and coating designs are conventional, and in practice, in-service failures are as often due to system design effects and contamination as to improper finishing or coating design errors.

The emerging roles of damage testing as a production process-control tool, in acceptance testing, and in failure diagnostics, are discussed and illustrated with specific examples and color photomicrographs. Particular attention is paid to the problems of (1) meeting widely varying test requirements, often on deliverable part of complex geometry, in timely and cost-effective fashion; and (2) relating calibrated single-mode damage test results to optics durability in highly multimode military systems. A brief review of a new repetitively pulsed dual-wavelength damage test station with exceptional configurational flexibility and advanced digital fluence profiling features is included.