Our achromatic zero-order wave plates consist of a polymer film stack laminated between two high-precision AR coated N-BK7 windows and are designed to operate with a high degree of retardation accuracy over a broad wavelength range.
Achromatic polymer wave plates have better angular acceptance and less sensitivity to wavelength change than achromatic quartz-MgF2 wave plates.
Newport achromatic zero-order wave plates are designed to operate with a high degree of retardation accuracy over a broad wavelength range. These true zero-order wave plates are constructed using a stack of birefringent polymer films laminated between two high-precision N-BK7 windows, each with a high efficiency, broadband antireflection coating. This construction ensures excellent transmitted wavefront quality, while minimizing beam deviation and surface reflection losses. The assembly is mounted in a black anodized aluminum housing for protection and ease of mounting, with the retarder fast axis marked for alignment reference.
The assembly is mounted in a black anodized aluminum housing for protection and ease of mounting, with the retarder fast axis marked for alignment reference. The standard 25.4 mm outer diameter is convenient for mounting into Newport rotary mounts.
Achromatic Zero-Order Waveplates have low sensitivity to incidence angle and wavelength. Retardation changes by less than 1% over a ±7° incidence angle and is maintained to better than ±λ/100 over the entire bandwidth. This is a significant improvement in angular acceptance and less sensitivity to wavelength change than achromatic quartz–MgF2 wave plates. One drawback however is that the achromatic waveplates have some variation in transmittance vs wavelength due to several polymer layers that are used in each achromatic wave plate. Quartz-MgF2 offer a higher and more uniform transmittance.