Design and fabrication of multispectral optics using expanded glass map

Abstract

As the desire to have compact multispectral imagers in various DoD platforms is growing, the dearth of multispectral optics is widely felt. With the limited number of material choices for optics, these multispectral imagers are often very bulky and impractical on several weight sensitive platforms. To address this issue, NRL has developed a large set of unique infrared glasses that transmit from 0.9 to > 14 μm in wavelength and expand the glass map for multispectral optics with refractive indices from 2.38 to 3.17. They show a large spread in dispersion (Abbe number) and offer some unique solutions for multispectral optics designs. The new NRL glasses can be easily molded and also fused together to make bonded doublets. A Zemax compatible glass file has been created and is available upon request. In this paper we present some designs, optics fabrication and imaging, all using NRL materials.