Optical film coating design

H. Angus Macleod, 2001, Thin-Film Optical Filters, Third Edition, ISBN 0 7503 0688 2, loP, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol and Philadelphia Alfred Thelen, 1988, Design of Optical Interference Coatings, ISBN 0-07-063786-5, McGraw-Hill Book Compagny... 

Anti-reflection coating An optical thin film interference coating designed to minimize reflections that occur when light travels from one medium into another. 

In multilayer production the growing Si02 film is periodically doped resulting in a sinusoidal film refractive index profile. The almost monolayer-by-monolayer growth control offers a new degree of freedom in optical coating design. 

Antireflection (AR) coating (ARC) (optics) A film structure designed to reduced reflection over a region of the spectrum so that radiation in that spectral region is transmitted into the substrate. 

CVD/PVD thin films are usually considered as coatings having a thickness of less than ten microns. This is an arbitrary limitation and perhaps a better definition would be a coating that adds little if any mass to the substrate. Most thin films, in fact, are much less than 10 im and may be even less than 0.2 im in the newer semiconductor and optical designs, while some wear and erosion applications can be much thicker than 10 im. 

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