Currently there is a need for retarders that do not degrade under elevated temperatures and intense illumination for use in displays and devices such as rear projection televisions. A stack of inorganic planar layers with alternating high and low refractive indices behaves as a form birefringent uniaxial material, but the sign of the birefringence is always negative. In the presentation we outline the use of serial bideposition with 90 deg incremental substrate rotations to generate positive uniaxial materials with a typical difference of 0.12 between the ordinary and extraordinary refractive indices. Optical methods for displaying the axial symmetry of the coatings and for measuring the birefringence are described and contrasted with previous and current work on inorganic biaxial materials.

Date Published: 19 August 2005
PDF: 15 pages
Proc. SPIE 5870, Advances in Thin-Film Coatings for Optical Applications II, 587001 (19 August 2005); doi: 10.1117/12.613990

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5870:
Advances in Thin-Film Coatings for Optical Applications II
Michael L. Fulton; Jennifer D. T. Kruschwitz, Editor(s)