We give a progress report on an application of a new class of versatile optical elements pioneered by our laboratory: By coating liquids we create reflective surfaces that can be shaped by rotation into a parabolic mirror. Coated ferrofluids can also be shaped with magnetic fields.Low cost is what makes rotating mercury LM Telescopes interesting. However, they are limited by the fact that they cannot be tilted. We are now working on a new generation of LMs that can be tilted. The goal is to produce large inexpensive LMTs that can be tilted by at least twenty degrees. Early work demonstrated a tilted LM that used a high viscosity liquid. An extrapolation law, confirmed by our experiments, shows that it should be possible to tilt LMs by twenty degrees, assuming a liquid having a few times the viscosity of glycerin. Rotating nanoengineered LMTs are interesting even without tilting, since their lower weight would make then less costly than Hg mirrors and high viscosity makes them less sensitive to winds.We have made two major recent technological breakthroughs: We have made a robotic machine which is capable of producing the large quantities of coating material required for large mirrors. We have also developed a technique that allows us to coat the appropriate class of liquids by simply spraying the nanoengineered coating on them. In this contribution, we present optical tests of our liquids as well as optical shop tests of rotating mirrors.

Conventional apparatus for the dipping and raising of slides usually uses an electric motor with the slides fixed in a rigid holder. Most of the devices create a great deal of vibrations and this produces a nonuniform film deposition. We have used a new apparatus, which does not produce any vibrations of the slide, to build up Langmuir–Blodgett films. To move the slide, we employ a column of water and use the siphon principle, with speeds that can be varied between 3.0 and 120.0 mm min−1. An electronic circuit controls the automatic dipping and raising of the slide. A relay switches the solenoid valve to move the piston in the opposite direction. A machined Teflon trough and antivibration mount are used for the monolayer preparation. With this method, the deposition ratio usually obtained for the cadmium arachidate and chlorophyll a is 1.00±0.05. The absorption spectrum of multilayers of chlorophyll a give a linear relation between the absorbance at 680 nm and the number of layers up to 10. The nonlinear relation for the number of layers higher than 10 is explained by the presence of aggregates.