Optical interference coating design contest 2016: a dispersive mirror and coating uniformity challenge

Abstract

A dispersive mirror and a coating uniformity challenge were the topics of the design contest held in conjunction with the 2016 Optical Interference Coatings topical meeting of The Optical Society (OSA). A total of 18 designers from China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United States submitted 38 total designs for problems A and B. Michael Trubetskov submitted the winning designs for all four design challenges. The design problems and the submitted solutions are described and evaluated.

Broadband loss-less optical thin-film depolarizing devices

“…1), which is known to be a key parameter for the control of light polarization [8,9]. There are different ways to design and produce such optical device, and among them are thin film interferential filters [24] (planar multilayers); indeed transverse gradients of optical thickness can be easily produced with these techniques when one takes advantage of non-uniformity effects within the vacuum chamber [25,26]. Consider now an incident plane wave illuminating this sample at oblique incidence i 0 from a transparent medium of refractive index n 0 .…”

“…The spatial variations of reflection are here assumed to originate from a non-uniformity effect which can be created during production of the films [22,25,33,34]. The simplest geometry is that of a sample positioned within the vacuum chamber in such a way that thickness non-uniformity is enhanced at its surface ( Fig.…”

“…Also, uniformity should be the same for all materials. However such technique has been largely validated to produce high quality linear filters, that is, narrow-band filters whose central wavelength λ 0 linearly varies with position (x,y) at their top surface [22,25,33,34]. Other techniques exist and involve different moving masks elaborated to control the uniformity.…”