Design and production of bicolour reflecting coatings with Au metal island films

Abstract

Optical properties of metal island films (MIFs) can be combined with interference of dielectric coatings. A set of multilayer designs containing metal clusters reflecting different colours from front and back side of the coating was obtained by numerical optimization. The chosen designs presenting the range of feasible colours were deposited by electron beam evaporation. Spectrophotometric and ellipsometric measurements verified that the produced coatings present an excellent agreement with the optical performance calculated from the designs. Numerical optimization was verified as a useful method in designing of coatings containing MIFs. This approach can ease the implementation of metal clusters into multilayer designs and broaden the applications of MIFs.

Lithography-free broadband visible light absorber based on a mono-layer of gold nanoparticles

“…with a mono-layer of nanoparticles on top) without resorting to a post-thermal annealing procedure, if one can control the substrate temperature during deposition. For example, a substrate temperature over 200 • C was used in [26] to facilitate particle formation during deposition. [24] also hints that a mono-layer of gold particles can also be deposited directly with the magnetron-sputtering process.…”

“…The strong deviation in effective permittivity for gold-island films from bulk gold's permittivity is widely known [13]. This fact has been exploited for fabricating colored samples with a single layer of gold-island film [26].…”

Effective optical constants of evaporated silver and copper island ultrathin films

“…This must be kept in mind when performing design calculations with metal island films. Practical examples of interference coatings with incorporated metal island films have frequently been reported during the last decades (see for example [2,6]). …”

Tailoring optical and non-optical properties of interference coating materials through the explicit use of small-scale optical inhomogeneities

“…Particularly with respect to narrowline refl ector designs, we mention the so-called grating waveguide structures as a further example of a sub-micrometer structured high-index optical coating with promising refl ection performance [61] . Owing to their low thickness [62] , these structured waveguides can combine high refl ectivity with a low surface strain even when the coating material exhibits some mechanical stress.…”