What's it about?

Tightening specifications and increasing demands for high performance optical coatings continue to drive advancements in many areas of the optical manufacturing industry. To ensure customer confidence, test and verification methods must be created to measure tighter tolerances than ever before for all aspects of thin-film quality control, including reflectance, transmittance, absorption, scatter, laser-damage threshold, lifetime stability, environmental durability, filter-edge steepness, deposition uniformity, and induced stress, to name a few. This talk will outline emerging performance requirements for optical thin films and the metrology solutions being developed to satisfy them.