A voice-coil actuator based motorized optical mount for high-performance laser beam routing

Abstract

We present a motorized optical mount based on a voice-coil actuator from an obsolete computer hard drive. Instead of using complex servo motors and motion sensors as the commercial motorized mounts, our homemade mount adopts a buffering circuit for motion control. The mount flips a 1 inch fused silica mirror in 600 ms, and the flip-to-flip spatial repeatability is better than 85 µrad. This performance is comparable to the commercial ones, while the cost is only one-tenth of the commercial price. Our device provides a convenient and low-cost solution for fast and precise laser beam routing that can be applied for various applications in optical experiments.