Commercially available deterministic polishing methods commonly induce excessive surface roughness, or grain decoration, on polycrystalline aspheres and freeforms. The excessive surface roughness causes optical scatter and limits optimal performance. In current work, a process developed at Optimax called VIBE Smoothing reduced the surface roughness after deterministic polishing from 80 Å rms to 20 Å rms, while maintaining the figure corrected form. This process enables production of high precision polycrystalline aspheres and freeforms.
