New mirror coating technology: promises dramatic improvements in telescopes.
New mirror coating technology: promises dramatic improvements in telescopes.
Existing telescopes could substantially increase their efficiency by coating their mirrors with silver instead of aluminum. The reason we want to have larger telescopes is to collect more light, so if your mirrors reflect more light it is like making them larger.
The new coating technology being developed at UC Santa Cruz could make it feasible. Researchers are using a technique called AML atomic layer deposition, which gradually builds a thin film of material, one molecular layer at a time, with excellent uniformity, thickness control and surface compliance of the substrate. In a pilot study, ALD provided much better protective coatings for silver mirror samples than traditional physical deposition techniques. The results of the pilot study, which used an ALD system in Kobayashi's lab designed for microelectronics, convinced the team to design a larger system that could accommodate telescope mirrors.
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