Yesterday we assembled the lase polishing system. The Co2 laser power can be controlled using a waveplate, so we can turn on the laser at maximum power and let it stabilize, before actually turning up the power sent to the disk.

The beam is focused with a 10" focal length lens, and sent to the disk edge, poiting slightly upward to avoid hitting any other part of the disk.

The disk is moved with a combination of a linear and rotation stage, controlled with a MATLAB script. We tuned the translation and rotation speed so that the edge always moves at about 0.5 mm/s. Some refinement of the movimentation procedure will follow.

We tried the setup with one of the damaged samples, and the results are quite good.

More work this afternoon