World leader in manufacturing aspheres and free form optics.
Overview
Since more than 50 years Thales SESO (former Société Européenne de Systèmes Optiques) has been a world leading designer and manufacturer of high-end optical components such as telescopes and space observation optics operating over the entire spectral range, from infrared to x-ray wavelengths. Thales SESO has supplied more than 80 Free form optics, which can exceed aspherical departures of 1 mm ( slope departures > 30 mrad), with extremely low roughness (<0.1 nm) on Zerodur and Silica material which are suitable for EUV multilayer coatings among others. Thales SESO has now the maturity and the industrial capacity to manage a recurring production of such high level optics, and this activity has already started to serve the semiconductor industry as a credible supplier of optics.
We have pioneered X-ray science conceiving, designing and manufacturing more than 1500 grazing incidence optics [1] requiring extreme performances in terms of shape errors rms (<1 nm) slope errors (<0.1 µrad) and roughness (<1 angstrom), among which more than 400 with lengths > 1 m.