Note: Reliable low-vibration piezo-mechanical shutter

Michael Bauer; Philipp Pierre Franzreb; Nicolas Spethmann; Artur Widera

doi:10.1063/1.4894205

Note: Reliable low-vibration piezo-mechanical shutter

Rev Sci Instrum. 2014 Sep;85(9):096101. doi: 10.1063/1.4894205.

Authors

Michael Bauer¹, Philipp Pierre Franzreb¹, Nicolas Spethmann², Artur Widera¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics and State-Research Center OPTIMAS, University of Kaiserslautern, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany.
² Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.

PMID: 25273787
DOI: 10.1063/1.4894205

Abstract

We present a mechanical shutter based on a bending piezo-actuator. The shutter features an active aperture of about 2 mm, allowing for full extinction and lossless transmission of a beam. Acoustic noise and mechanical vibrations produced are very low and the shutter is outstandingly long-lived; a test device has undergone 20 × 10(6) cycles without breaking. A reflector makes the shutter capable of reliably interrupting a beam with at least 2 W of cw power at 780 nm. The shutter is well suited to create pulses as short as 16 ms, while pulse lengths down to 1 ms are possible. The rise and fall times are approximately 120 µs, with a delay of 2 ms. Jitter stays below 10 µs, while long-term drifts stay well below 500 µs.