A Corner Cube Retroreflector is an optical component that causes the emerging light to exit in the direction parallel to its entrance direction regardless of the incident angle (i.e., deviate the incident light at 180 degrees without dependence on the incident angle).
Although the name “corner cube retroreflector” contains the word “cube”, it does not resemble the shape of a cube. A corner cube prism composes three faces at the top orthogonal to each other to form a corner of a cube, and a bottom entrance face, which is flat circular, and perpendicular to the cube’s diagonal. The working principle of the corner cube is that light undergoes three times of total internal reflection (TIR) on the orthogonal faces, redirecting towards its original direction, or through specular reflections, depending on whether the reflective faces are coated. Compared with optical mirrors, which can only accomplish the same task when the incident angle is 90°, corner cube retroreflectors are advantages in applications where precise angular alignments are difficult. The parallelisms at which light is returned relate to the angular accuracies of the perpendicular roofs of the cube retroreflector, the higher the precision of the prism, the better the parallelism of the light path.
With over 10 years of experience and passionate pursuit, Shalom EO has developed a capable production workshop that could offer various kinds of custom and off-the-shelf corner cube retroreflectors, including:
1. standard corner cube retroreflectors of routine choices.
2. truncated corner cube reflectors of lightweight and compact dimensions.
3. lateral transfer corner cube retroreflectors with one trihedral reflecting face at one terminal of the prism and two trihedral reflecting faces forming a roof edge at the other end are designed for applications obliging a lateral beam displacement.
4. Customized hollow corner retroreflectors that perform great in low-pressure conditions and mitigate the aberrations derived from glass dispersion and temperature fluctuations.
About the substrate material, Shalom EO presents a wide selection such as N-BK7, UV Fused Silica, and other optical glass materials. At the current time, N-BK7 and UVFS corner cube retroreflectors are in storage, if you are interested in other substrate materials, please inquire us. Both high-reflection coatings, anti-reflection coatings, and diverse metal coatings like silver coating, gold coatings, and coatings in the visible, UV, and NIR spectrum could all be furnished at the roof or the entrance face according to your requirements.
Figure 1. is a simple diagram that illustrates the light path inside a corner cube retroreflector.