Australian optician of German origin
Achim Leistner is an Australian optician of German origin. During his retirement, he was asked to join the Avogadro project to craft a silicon sphere with high smoothness.
Leistner studied optics at Optik Carl Zeiss in Jena, Germany, and in 1953 qualified as a precision optical craftsman. He moved to Australia in 1957, and worked in CSIRO on optical fabrication methods.
In addition to precision instruments, Leistner uses his hands to feel for irregularities in the roundness of the sphere. The research team has called his extraordinary sense of touch "atomic feeling". As a result the sphere is the roundest man-made object ever. If it were scaled to the size of the Earth, it would have a high point of only above "sea level".
Awards and recognition.
Leistner holds certificates in precision optics, geometrical optics, optical design drawing, and mathematics from Optic Carl Zeiss Jena Technical College. He has served as a member of the Australian Optical Society and on international conference working committees for SPIE and the Optical Society of America.
In 2000 he was awarded OSA's David Richardson Medal, "for the development of novel optical fabrication techniques and the design improvement of optical test equipment. By refining the Teflon lap polishing technique and performing research into the mechanism of optical polishing, he has improved the quality and precision of superpolished optical surfaces, pushing the accuracy of shapes and surface roughness down to nearly atomic dimensions."
In 2010 he became an Honorary Fellow with the CSIRO Division of Material Science and Engineering
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