Fabrication of broadband antireflection coatings using wavelength-indirect broadband optical monitoring

Abstract Multi-layer optical coatings with complex spectrum requirements, such as multi-band pass filters, notch filters, ultra-broadband antireflection coating and etc., whose working wavelength is out of monitoring wavelength range, are difficult to be fabricated using direct broadband optical monitoring (BBOM). In this paper, a broadband antireflection (AR) coating in the wavelength range from 1300 nm to 2000 nm at 45° incident was designed and deposited by dual ion beam sputtering (DIBS). Ta 2 O 5 and SiO 2 were chosen as high and low refractive index coating materials, respectively. The optimized coating structure contains 4 non-quarter-wave (QW) layers. In order to obtain high transmittance, the most important is to realize the thickness accurate control. Due to the limitation of the monitoring wavelength range, which is only from 450 nm to 1000 nm, a wavelength-indirect broadband optical monitoring strategy was successfully employed to control the layers thickness during the deposition process. At last, a good agreement between theoretical and measured transmittance is obtained. The maximum error (the first layer) is only about 5.3% and the minimum error (the third layer) is about −0.25% base on the results of reverse engineering analysis.