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Thin Film Coating Examples

TFCalc is capable of designing multilayer coatings for many applications. To aid the designer, 36 sample designs are included with TFCalc.

Beamsplitters

A great variety of coatings fall into the “beam splitter” category. In general, whenever both the reflected and transmitted light are controlled, the coating is called a beamsplitter. Quite often, the coating must operate at angles other than normal incidence. The design is more difficult when the polarization of the reflected and/or transmitted light must be controlled. Even more difficult are designs that seek to control the phase change of the reflected or transmitted light. Another factor is the width of the spectrum over which the coating is to operate.

The graphic below shows the performance of a 40-layer polarizing beamsplitter which performs quite well from 525 to 565 nm. Note that the S polarization is very close to zero in the entire 500-600 nm region. This non-traditional design was created with the needle optimization method.

Plot of beamsplitter design