Welcome to the Optical Calcite website

Optical calcite is used to make calcite polarizers. The calcite needed to make polarizers are all made from high-grade, birefringent, calcite crystals.

Calcite is well known for its birefringent qualities.Due to the birefringent structure of calcite, a differential delay is created between two orthogonally polarized waves traveling in the crystal.

Calcite polarizer can be designed as a polarization splitter

Or as a polarizer element that removes the angled, orthogonally polarized component of a beam.  

Calcite polarizers are typically built out of two prisms. Since calcite is a soft crystal that is easily damaged, almost all calcite polarizers are placed in metal housings. These mounted crystals lenses are called Glan-Taylor calcite polarizer or Glan-Thombson polarizer.

We sell the raw crystals for the manufacture of these polarizing laser lenses.

We own several Calcite mines in Africa and supply clients across the globe with optical quality calcite. We would love to become your prefered supplier.

We mine and supply optical Calcite crystals (Iceland Spar) in raw form.

• The optical calcite crystals are carefully selected at the mine to eliminate any inclusions
• Careful selection means that the crystals you will receive will have no cleavage planes, cloud and mist, point defects and bubbles inside the crystal.
• Each crystal is marked and photographed and the exact dimensions are supplied.

We have a 100% refund policy. If a crystal shows any defect we will refund you the total value paid and the postage charge upon the return of the merchandise in the original form.

Our calcite is known for its properties of transparency and double refraction.

The crystals are also used in the manufacture of Nicol prisms, polarizers and waveplates which are essential parts of polarizing components and other special optical instruments.

• Calcite specifications:
  Surface Quality: 10/5 Scratch and Dig
  Dimension tolerance: ±0.1 mm
  Parallelism: < 5 arc. sec.
  Beam Deviation: <3 arc. min.
  Optical axis orientation: +/-0.2°
  Flatness: λ/4 @ 632.8 nm
  Transmission wavefront distortion: < λ/2 @ 632.8 nm

Please fill in the form below if you are interested and we will get right back to you