A low-steering piezo-driven mirror

TL;DR

This paper introduces a piezo-driven mirror with high stability and bandwidth, capable of precise tilt-free displacements suitable for optical applications, demonstrated in cold atom experiments.

Contribution

A novel tripod piezo actuator design achieves high-frequency, low-tilt mirror steering with minimized residual tilting, enhancing optical system performance.

Findings

Resonance-free bandwidth up to 51kHz

Displacements up to 2μm at 8kHz

Maximum static steering error of 5.5rad/μm

Abstract

We present a piezo-driven translatable mirror with excellent pointing stability, capable of driving at frequencies up to tens of kilohertz. Our system uses a tripod of piezo actuators with independently controllable drive voltages, where the ratios of the individual drive voltages are tuned to minimize residual tilting. Attached to a standard {\varnothing}= 12.7mm mirror, the system has a resonance-free mechanical bandwidth up to 51kHz, with displacements up to 2{\mu}m at 8kHz. The maximum static steering error is 5.5rad per micrometer displaced and the dynamic steering error is lower than 0.6rad/{\mu}m. This simple design should be useful for a large set of optical applications where tilt-free displacements are required, and we demonstrate its application in an ensemble of cold atoms trapped in periodically driven optical lattices.