Anti-reflection Coatings | previous | next | feedback |
You can buy anti-reflection coatings from:
- EKSMA Optics offers laser line, dual and broadband AR coatings for optics. Standard wavelengths are provided in online catalogue, custom wavelengths are available on request.
Ask RP Photonics for advice concerning the design of anti-reflection coatings. RP Photonics has the powerful RP Coating software for designing such coatings.
Acronym: AR coating
Definition: optical thin-film coatings for reducing reflections from surfaces
An anti-reflection coating (AR coating) is a dielectric thin-film coating applied to an optical surface in order to reduce the optical reflectivity of that surface in a certain wavelength range. In most cases, the basic principle of operation is that reflected waves from different optical interfaces largely cancel each other by destructive interference.
Single-layer Anti-reflection Coatings
In the simplest case, an antireflection thin-film coating designed for normal incidence consists of a single quarter-wave layer of a material the refractive index of which is close to the geometric mean value of the refractive indices of the two adjacent media. In that situation, two reflections of equal magnitude arise at the two interfaces, and these cancel each other by destructive interference.
The limitations of this approach are twofold:
- It is not always possible to find a coating material with suitable refractive index, particularly in cases where the bulk medium has a relatively low refractive index.
- A single-layer coating works only in a limited bandwidth (wavelength range).
Multilayer Coatings
If no suitable medium for a single-layer coating can be found, or if anti-reflective properties are required for a very broad wavelength range (or for different wavelength ranges simultaneously, or for different angles of incidence), more complicated designs may be used, which usually have to be found using numerical techniques. A general tradeoff of such multilayer designs is between a low residual reflectivity and a large bandwidth.
Figure 1: Reflectivity curve for a numerically optimized anti-reflection coating on a BK7 glass substrate for 1064 nm and 532 nm. Two layer pairs of TiO2 and SiO2 are used.
Apart from those properties, the tolerance to growth errors may also be of interest: there are sophisticated coating designs which reach a high performance only for very precise manufacturing. The growth error tolerance is therefore an important aspect to be considered in the design.
Design Methods
Analytical design rules exist for simple types of anti-reflection coatings with very few thin-film layers. For more sophisticated designs, numerical optimization algorithms similar to those described in the article on dielectric mirrors can be used. The resulting designs are normally not easily understood, as the anti-reflection properties result from a complicated interference of the reflections from various interfaces.
Gradient Index Coatings
A wide range of possibilities arises from gradient index coatings (or graded-index coatings) [2, 3, 9], where the composition of a layer material is gradually varied. In the simplest case, a smooth index transition between two optical materials over a length scale of a few wavelengths can suppress fairly well the reflection over a wide spectral and angular range. This is difficult to realize, however, for surfaces next to air, since all solid materials have a refractive index significantly different from that of air. One solution is to use nanooptics in the form of sub-wavelength pyramid structures or the like (moth eye structure), see e.g. Refs. [1], [2] and [7]. Such structures simulate a smooth transition of the refractive index to 1 by smoothly reducing the amount of solid material in a plane parallel to the surface. However, there are also solutions without nanooptics, in particular the integration of gradient index layers into a multilayer coating. This allows for good broadband anti-reflection properties in a wide angular range without using materials with a very small refractive index.
Applications
Anti-reflection coatings [3] are often used for optical components in order to reduce optical losses and sometimes also the detrimental influence of reflected beams. The residual reflectivity for a given wavelength and angle of incidence is often of the order of 0.2%, or less (in a limited bandwidth) with careful optimization. For application on prescription glasses, the achievable suppression of reflections is significantly lower, since the coating must operate in a wide wavelength range and for a wide range of incidence angles. AR coatings are also used on laser crystals and nonlinear crystals. In such cases, additional challenges can arise from anisotropic thermal expansion e.g. of lithium triborate (LBO) crystals.
In most cases, AR coatings are used on optical interfaces with an area of at least a few millimeters squared. However, it is also possible to produce such coatings on the ends of optical fibers, sometimes even in jacketed and connectorized assemblies. There are various technical difficulties, e.g. related to outgasing of polymer jackets in a vacuum chamber and to the limited number of fiber ends which can be treated in one batch, but specialized sputtering processes have been developed which mitigate these problems. The coating performance can be as good as for normal bulk surfaces, at least for simple coating designs with only fewer layers.
Damage Threshold
Apart from the reflection properties, the damage threshold of anti-reflection coatings can be of interest, for example for use in components for Q-switched lasers. Depending on the material combination, an AR coating can have a higher or lower damage threshold than the substrate material.
Even for given coating materials, the damage threshold can vary considerably depending on the fabrication technique. Ion beam sputtering is known to allow for relatively high damage thresholds.
Bibliography
| [1] | P. B. Clapham and M. C. Hutley, “Reduction of lens reflexion by the 'Moth Eye' principle”, Nature 244, 281 (1973) |
| [2] | W. H. Lowdermilk and D. Milam, “Graded-index antireflection surfaces for high-power laser applications”, Appl. Phys. Lett. 36 (11), 891 (1980) |
| [3] | W. H. Southwell, “Gradient-index antireflection coatings”, Opt. Lett. 8 (11), 584 (1983) |
| [4] | J. A. Dobrowolski et al., “Optimal single-band normal-incidence antireflection coatings”, Appl. Opt. 35 (4), 644 (1996) |
| [5] | V. Janicki et al., “Hybrid optical coating design for omnidirectional antireflection purposes”, J. Opt. A: Pure Appl. Opt. 7, L9 (2005) |
| [6] | J.-Q. Xi et al., “Optical thin-film materials with low refractive index for broadband elimination of Fresnel reflection”, Nat. Photonics 1, 176 (2007) |
| [7] | N. C. Linn et al., “Self-assembled biomimetic antireflection coatings”, Appl. Phys. Lett. 91, 101108 (2007) |
| [8] | D. S. Hobbs and B. D. MacLeod, “High laser damage threshold surface relief micro-structures for anti-reflection applications”, SPIE 6720, 67200L (2007) |
| [9] | D. J. Poxson et al., “Broadband omnidirectional antireflection coatings optimized by genetic algorithm”, Opt. Lett. 34 (6), 728 (2009) |
See also: dielectric coatings, dielectric mirrors
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