MUHWA JGS2 Quartz Round Slide — 50mm Diameter, 6mm Thick
When your microscope or spectroscopy setup needs a substrate that's optically invisible from 200nm to 2500nm, soda-lime glass or borosilicate won't cut it. Those materials absorb in the UV — borosilicate starts cutting off around 320nm, soda-lime even earlier. If you're doing UV fluorescence microscopy, deep-UV Raman, or laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, the substrate itself is part of your optical path, and any absorption in the substrate is signal lost.
JGS2 is the Chinese designation for UV-grade fused quartz — equivalent to Suprasil 2 or Corning 7980 in Western nomenclature. It's synthetic fused silica made from SiCl4 in a flame hydrolysis process, which gives it extremely low metal impurity content: iron under 0.1ppm, aluminum under 10ppm, total metals under 20ppm. The result is a transmission curve that's flat from about 190nm through 2500nm with an internal transmittance above 90% across the entire range (for 6mm thickness).
Why 50mm diameter, 6mm thick
Fifty millimeters gives you a large working area — enough to mount multiple samples, or to use as a beam splitter substrate, or as a window in a vacuum chamber. Six millimeters of thickness provides mechanical rigidity — the slide doesn't flex under its own weight or warp under moderate clamping pressure. At UV wavelengths, even minor surface deflection changes the optical path, so rigidity matters. The surfaces are polished to optical flatness — λ/4 at 632.8nm — which means transmitted wavefront distortion is under control.
Specifications
| Material |
JGS2 fused quartz (synthetic fused silica) |
| Dimensions |
50mm diameter x 6mm thickness |
| Transmission |
>90% internal transmittance, 200–2500nm (6mm path) |
| Surface quality |
40-20 scratch-dig |
| Flatness |
λ/4 at 632.8nm |
| OH content |
<200ppm |
Handling and cleaning
Quartz is hard (Mohs 7) but brittle — it chips at the edges if dropped onto a hard surface. Handle by the edge, not the face. For cleaning, use the standard optics protocol: blow off dust with compressed air or a bulb blower, then wipe with lens tissue moistened with spectroscopic-grade methanol or isopropanol. Don't apply pressure — let the solvent do the work. For stubborn residues (finger oils, vacuum grease), soak in acetone followed by methanol. Store in a clean, dust-free container — a 50mm Petri dish with a lens tissue liner works well.
