Development of Nanostructured Antireflection Coatings for Infrared and Electro-Optical Systems

Electro-optic infrared technologies and systems operating from ultraviolet (UV) to long-wave infrared (LWIR) spectra are being developed for a variety of defense and commercial systems applications. Loss of a significant portion of the incident signal due to reflection limits the performance of electro-optic infrared (IR) sensing systems. A critical technology being developed to overcome this limitation and enhance the performance of sensing systems is advanced antireflection (AR) coatings. Magnolia is actively involved in the development and advancement of nanostructured AR coatings for a wide variety of defense and commercial applications. Ultrahigh AR performance has been demonstrated for UV to LWIR spectral bands on various substrates. The AR coatings enhance the optical transmission through optical components and devices by significantly minimizing reflection losses, a substantial improvement over conventional thin-film AR coating technologies. Nanostructured AR coatings have been fabricated using a nanomanufacturable self-assembly process on substrates that are transparent for a given spectrum of interest ranging from UV to LWIR. The nanostructured multilayer structures have been designed, developed and optimized for various optoelectronic applications. The optical properties of optical components and sensor substrates coated with AR structures have been measured and the process parameters fine-tuned to achieve a predicted high level of performance. In this paper, we review our latest work on high quality nanostructure-based AR coatings, including recent efforts on the development of nanostructured AR coatings on IR substrates.