OSSC member and 2009-2010 President Robert (Bob) F. Cartland presented at the 2010 OSA Topical Meeting on Optical Interference Coatings (OIC) held June 6-11 in Tucson, AZ. The OIC topical meeting is held every three years attracting engineers and scientist from around the world. Over 305 attended the meeting with 185 invited and contributed papers in the areas of design, fabrication and characterization of devices based on thin film optical coatings.
The title of the work, "Measuring Optical Scatter at Material Interfaces Using a Hemisphere," describes a method to measure scatter within a material substrate that corrects for the beam displacement, angle of incidence changes as well as polarization and surface reflectance sensitivities that occur if a slab were to be used. The paper included analysis of the hemisphere as a powered mirror and refractive element (a thick lens) and showed how to consider the effects of the hemisphere in the scatter data.
Bob is the Technical Manager of the Scatter and Spectrophotometry Lab at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems in El Segundo, CA. Bob's lab was also one of 16 labs from around the world that participated in the OIC measurement problem presented at the same meeting by Angela Duparré of the Fraunhofer Inst, fur Angewandte Optik und Feinmechanik, Germany. The problem compared measured reflectance data provided by the participants of two low-loss laser mirrors. Scatter data from Bob's lab was also presented by Duparré to demonstrate the importance of scatter losses in the tested components.
A three page paper based on Bob's presentation is available on the OSA OpticsInfoBase.
Citation: R. F. Cartland, Jr., "Measuring Optical Scatter at Material Interfaces Using a Hemisphere," in Optical Interference Coatings, OSA Technical Digest (Optical Society of America, 2010), paper ThD5.
Abstract: Interfacial light scatter within a substrate was measured using a hemisphere. The hemisphere corrects the problem of refractive beam displacement allowing the bidirectional reflectance distribution function within the substrate to be determined.