Transparent ceramics and magneto-optical devices

Abstract

To provide a transparent ceramic in which fine refraction factor unevenness present at the inside thereof lies in a prescribed range, so that a big change (collapse) does not occur in the beam quality of a laser beam to be transmitted.SOLUTION: A transparent ceramic has a light path length of 5 mm or more and satisfies the arithmetic average roughness Ra in an optical face which allows light to enter and exist of <5 nm. In a gray scale histogram obtained by executing the following image analysis about a schlieren image as a transmission image of the transparent ceramic, when the peak position of frequencies satisfies a gray scale gradation of 100 or more to 200 or less, the half value width of the peak is 11 or less. (IMAGE ANALYSIS METHOD) The schlieren image of the transparent ceramic is obtained as an image having a pixel number of 10,000 or more, and numerical conversion is executed at a gray scale 256 gradation per pixel regarding the image to obtain a gray scale histogram showing frequencies per gray scale gradation.SELECTED DRAWING: Figure 2

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