The ion beam technology is used for finish treatment of large-scale optic parts to achieve highest precision and minimal surface roughness. The surface roughness increases during the ion treatment of polycrystalline materials in contrast to usual optic materials. This is caused, first, by polycrystalline structure of material and, second, by micro-defects appearing on its surface. The aim of the work is to investigate the influence of ion processing conditions on the amount of defects formed on the polycrystalline glass CO-115M.

As an ion source, was used the anode layer accelerator with electromagnetically focusing ion beam and with excess charge compensation on the residual gas. The ion accelerator provided Gaussian ion current distribution on the treated sample surface. The accelerator had three operation conditions: 1 – Ud = 2 kV, Id = 110 mA; 2 – Ud = 3 kV, Id = 110 mA; 3 – Ud = 3,8 kV, Id = 50 mA (Ud – discharge voltage, Id – discharge current). Processing time was 30 min.

For quantitative estimation of surface destruction degree the surface defects density was used which is equal to the ratio of total area of defects within the region under consideration to entire area. Defects area was calculated using the microphotography of treated surface.

The investigations have shown that the defects occurred as microscopic chips in all operation conditions of treatment. The defects density distribution corresponds to ion current distribution on the sample surface. With increasing ion current power density a size of defects has grown and their amount has increased. With the constant power density an increasing acceleration voltage results in decreasing density of defects. It was shown that a process of appearing defects is of the threshold nature. For each accelerated voltage there is a power density at which defects do not appear. The work results may be useful to choose the ion beam processing operation conditions in manufacturing large-scale optics.