天文望远镜反射镜面的飞秒激光清洁

Femtosecond laser cleaning the surface of reflective mirror in telescope

金属镜面反射镜是反射式天文望远镜中成像系统的核心部件,反射镜定期清洗是天文望远镜维护中的一项重要工作。目前采用的干冰人工清洗方法工序繁杂,成本较高,还需要定期使用清洁剂和清洁布擦拭的方法去除难以清洗的污染物,容易损伤镜面。针对以上缺点,本文利用放大级飞秒脉冲激光器,对天文望远镜中反射表面上黏附的微米级灰尘颗粒进行了清洁研究。首先研究了飞秒激光与反射铝镜的作用规律,通过调节激光能量密度,对清洗后的铝镜表面形貌进行观测,得出实验用铝镜的飞秒激光损伤阈值为60 m J/cm^2。通过改变激光能量等扫描参数,对清洁前后的铝镜镜面附着物进行分析,得到最优的清洁参数。结果表明,当激光能量密度为30-55m J/cm^2时,飞秒激光对微米级灰尘颗粒有良好的清洁效果。在可见光范围内,清洁后的反射镜镜面反射率获得了明显的提升。最后,通过对灰尘颗粒及铝镜基底的能谱分析,对飞秒激光的清洁机理进行了讨论,在灰尘颗粒的激光清洁中热膨胀因素占据主导作用。飞秒激光清洁在天文望远镜的清洁领域有着良好的应用前景。

Metallic mirror is the core component of the imaging system in the reflective astronomical telescope. However, because the telescopes are usually located in the wild, they are often contaminated by dust and other pollutants which will greatly reduce the imaging quality. Therefore, the surface of reflective mirror in telescope should be cleaned routinely in order to recover high performance of telescope. Currently, the artificial ice cleaning is the most common method employed in the cleaning of mirror surface, which is complicated and costly. Besides, the micron particles adhered on the surface of the mirror are especially difficult to be removed by dry ice flow when their diameters are less than 20 mm because of the Van der Waals＇ force between the particles and metal mirror. Moreover, an ordinary method with wipe and cleanser is also used in which the friction between wipe and mirror may damage the telescope. To overcome these shortcomings, this work proposed a laser cleaning strategy in which amplified femtosecond pulsed lasers was used to clean the reflecting mirror surface. As a new cleaning method, laser cleaning technology which is non-contact and frictionless has been applied successfully in the cleaning of industrial molds, buildings, precision machinery components. For the advantages of femtosecond laser, such as short pulse duration, small thermal effects, high pulse energy, it has been used in the cleaning of cultural relics and has good achievement in recent years. This article firstly studied the interaction between the femtosecond laser and the reflective aluminum mirror. The laser damage threshold of aluminum mirror was measured about 60 m J/cm^2, which would reduce to 57 m J/cm^2 for dirty mirror because of the microparticles adhered on the surface of reflector mirror. Then, by optimizing laser parameters including the scan rate, the scan pitch, and the laser energy, it could be found that when the laser energy density ranges from 30 to 55 m J/cm-2, micron dust particles with diameters less than 20 mm on mirror surface could be cleaned with excellent clean effect and the reflectivity in the visible light region has been greatly improved. Finally, through the dust particles and aluminum mirror substrate spectrum analysis, we ruled out that the removed microparticles were thermal melted by laser energy. The results indicated that thermal expansion plays the key role in laser cleaning of metal mirror. This work shows that femtosecond laser cleaning has a good effect on the removing of micron particles. As a simple and easy way, femtosecond laser cleaning has a good prospect in cleaning of astronomical telescope.