Diamond shifting cutting of hexagonal cube corner retroreflectors

Hexagonal cube corner retroreflectors (HCCRs) are optical elements with high reflectivity. However, it is a discontinuous structure, and the conventional diamond cutting was considered infeasible to fabricate HCCRs. Therefore, a new machining method, Diamond Shifting Cutting (DSC), was proposed as a viable option for fabricating HCCRs. In this paper, the mechanism of DSC was described. The cutting experiments were performed for different structure sizes (50, 80, 500, and 1650 mu m). Experimental results show that DSC is feasible to fabricate HCCRs with optical surface and almost sub-micrometer form accuracy. In particular, the developed method can improve the machining efficiency by at least 3 times compared to the previously proposed method.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a new machining method called Diamond Shifting Cutting (DSC) for fabricating Hexagonal cube corner retroreflectors (HCCRs) and conducts cutting experiments. The experimental results show that this method can effectively produce HCCRs with high precision.