Thorlabs Performance™ Optical Breadboards are 4.3" thick and provide enhanced stiffness and standard damping, making them an ideal solution for general lab purposes and a favorite OEM breadboard.

Features

• Athermalized Design for Excellent Thermal Stability
• Low Deflection Under Load
• Plated Steel Honeycomb Core and Internal Damping Provide Both Static and Dynamic Rigidity
• Magnetic Stainless Steel Top and Bottom Plates
• Excellent Surface Flatness Achieved by Using a Single State-of-the-Art Material and a Thermal Bonding Process

Choosing an Optical Breadboard

When choosing an optical breadboard, two main features should be considered: Stiffness and Damping.

Stiffness
Thorlabs offers two levels of stiffness: High and Enhanced. While strongly correlated to the thickness of the breadboard, the differences in stiffness translate to a different deflection under load. The higher the stiffness, the better the ability of the breadboard to resist bending when a load or force is applied to the breadboard. As such, when placing a heavy load in the center of the breadboard, a high stiffness breadboard will deflect more than an enhanced stiffness breadboard. This deflection can create misalignment between two components on opposite ends of the breadboard. This feature is especially important when, for example, conducting experiments which require sliding optical setups across the breadboard while maintaining a straight optical axis.

Damping
Thorlabs offers two levels of damping: Standard and Enhanced. The damping of the breadboard is the behavior of the breadboard when noise (typically from instrumentation or acoustic noise) is introduced on the breadboard. Ideally, a breadboard would be able to dissipate energy from such noise by behaving as a single rigid surface, i.e. the entire breadboard would move, as one piece, up or down without resonating. However, when noise is introduced on a breadboard surface with low damping, such as that generated by an optical chopper, the breadboard can resonate, causing temporary differential changes on the surface. Such temporary resonance can be harmful when, for example, aligning beams across a breadboard in a free-space experiment.

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Construction

High Stiffness
Our Performance Breadboards incorporate a double plate (top and bottom), single-honeycomb design, providing excellent stiffness and dynamic rigidity. The top layer consists of a stainless steel top plate. The second layer adds the main steel honeycomb structure and the stainless steel bottom plate. The main honeycomb core is fabricated from strips of precision-formed plated steel, which is bonded together with an epoxy adhesive with high tensile strength.

Excellent Surface Flatness
Breadboard flatness is critically important during many experimental setups. Lack of local flatness requires readjustment of components for height variations across the breadboard and can cause component "wobble." Thorlabs' breadboards offer unsurpassed flatness due to the high-precision magnetic stainless-steel plates which are specially handled to maintain superior flatness throughout the manufacturing process. A unique thermal bonding process ensures that stress is not induced during manufacturing, thereby retaining the flatness of the top plate.

Athermalized Design
Thorlabs' breadboards employ matching magnetic stainless steel for both the top and bottom plates. This unique athermalized design eliminates any thermal bowing effects caused by temperature variations.