Quantum Mechanism of Optical Glass Polishing

Abstract

As a result of studying the mechanism of optical glass polishing by means of disperse systems from ceria powders, it has been established that glass is eliminated via the removal of sludge nanoparticles from the treated surface during its interaction with polishing powder particles, which occurs in an open microresonator formed by the surfaces of the treated material and polishing powder particles due to Förster resonant energy transfer between the energy levels of polishing powder and treated material particles. It has been shown that, in a bimodal system with a discrete spectrum of natural frequencies, the number of sludge nanoparticles generated in the treated surface–disperse system–lap surface grows with an increase in the bulk wear coefficient, the lifetime of the excited state of treated surface clusters, and the microresonator Q factor. A method of calculating the treated material removal rate and the roughness parameters of polished surfaces has been developed to establish that the deviation of the calculated polishing rate from experimental data is less than 2%, and the errors of calculating the arithmetic mean R_a and mean square R_q deviations of the polished surface profile attain 10%, and the calculated maximum profile height R_max is 40–50% underestimated as compared to experimental data.