Optical coating facilities at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias

The Instrumentation Division of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) is involved since several years in upgrading its capacities to design and manufacture optical components. To this end, we have created a new laboratory (Centre for Advanced Optical Systems, CSOA) which will be capable to design, fabricate and qualify large optical elements. Within these efforts, an optical coating facility is being built aimed at coating and surface finishing of different components, such filters, mirrors and alike, with sizes ranging from few cm to about 1.5 m. The facilities are still in construction and we have already started to experience with medium size filters and mirrors, using a large variety of metallic coatings, both for antireflection properties and spectral band selection. <br/> <br clear="all"/> Our present capacities included a sputtering coating machine, capable to treat pieces up to half a meter of diameter, and E-beam and thermal evaporation. In this contribution we describe the current laboratory setup and report on the results achieved so far in the field of surface coating with different materials.