No abstract

Defect free direct bonding of rigid and large area glass samples, such as prisms, becomes increasingly important for the manufacturing of modern optical and optomechanical components. Typically, in order to apply a static load during the annealing step, specialized heat-resistant pressure mountings are required. This makes manufacturing effortful and cost-intensive. In this paper, we present plasma activated bonding experiments conducted on fused silica plates where residual stress has been introduced prior to the contacting step and where annealing is performed with and without a static load. We find that in case of a sufficiently smooth surface, bonding strength is insensitive towards residual stress or static load, or more precisely, towards the interface stress. Furthermore, the residual Fresnel reflection losses of the realized bonding interface were optically measured and they amount to only $$10^{-6}$$ 10 - 6 . We propose that a consideration of the change in Gibbs free energy, dG, allows qualitatively predicting the resulting bonding strength and its spatial distribution, where dG is determined by surface energy and interface stress. At the end of this article, conceivable applications are discussed.

For the manufacturing of space-qualified spectrometric applications, the benefits of direct bonding are highly promising. While there are some recent spectrometric design concepts which rely on the usage of optical coatings, the direct bonding of optical glasses with added optical coatings is still challenging. This work presents investigations on plasma-activated direct bonding of optical glasses without and with added optical coatings. As a result, it is highly beneficial to add an additional SiO 2 final layer onto the coating and to perform an additional chemical-mechanical polishing process prior to direct bonding in order to achieve high bonding strengths.

We report on the design and fabrication of a novel all-glass four-channel beam splitter based on a Kösters prism for use in space. The Kösters prism, which consists of three pairs of individual prisms, is used to separate an incoming telescope beam into four spectral channels (λ = 800–1700 nm) with the goal to obtain a multi-band photometry of cosmic sources in the optical/near-infrared bands. We performed optical design studies to evaluate the influence of geometrical tolerances of the six individual prisms on the image quality. A stray light analysis revealed the impact of the composition on the overall optical performance. Mechanical design studies benchmarked possible mounting strategies. We considered optical adhesives, soldering and clamping. The influence of the mechanical loads during a rocket launch as well as thermal loads at 140 K (the operation temperature of the optical element) were studied. We optimized the coating properties of the prisms by considering the results from the optical design study as well as the technological requirements for the direct bonding of the prisms. Bonding strategies to realize the prism pairs were developed and successfully tested. A demonstrator Kösters prism was manufactured and is ready to validate its optical performance.