Newport Thin Film Laboratory

Broad Band Antireflection Coatings

The design and structure of multilayer anti-reflection coatings is too complicated to be described briefly.   However, there are a number of general principles that are helpful to keep in mind.

• There is a trade off between the width of the anti-reflection wavelength band and the absolute reflectance attainable.

• Lower angles of incidence result in lower reflectance over bandwidths.

• For optimal performance, different coating designs are required for substrates that have different indices of refraction.  Also, different coating designs are required for different entrance or exit media.  That is, the coating required to minimize the reflectance at an air/fused silica interface is different from the coating required to minimize the reflectance at a water/fused silica interface.  Note that if two media have the same index of refraction, there is no reflectance loss, so no anti-reflection coating is required.

NTFL had designed and manufactured hundreds of different anti-reflection coatings for a myriad of different applications.  Below is a common multilayer BBAR coating for an air/glass interface in the visible spectrum.  Please contact us with your requirements and we will send you a spectral simulation of the performance that can be achieved.

NTFL 10355000 visible broad band anti-reflection coating

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Last modified: 08/16/09