Home > Thin-film optics

In manufacturing, thin film layers can be achieved through the deposition of one or more thin layers of material onto a substrate (usually glass), most often by a physical vapor deposition process such as evaporative or sputtering, or a chemical process such as chemical vapor deposition. These thin films are used to create optical coatings.

This process is used to create low-emissivity panes of glass for houses and cars, anti-reflective coatings on spectacles, reflective baffles on car headlights, and for high precision optical filters and mirrorThis article is about the reflective surfaces. A mirror is a reflective surface that is smooth enough to be able to form an image. The best known example is the plane mirror that most people have at home. In it, a parallel beam of light changes its directs.

Thin-film layers are also common in the natural world, in soap bubbles and oil slicks as mentioned above, as well as in many branches of the animal kingdom. For example, the reflective and iridescentBlue Morpho butterfly wings. Iridescence is an optical phenomenon characterized in the Oxford English Dictionary as the property of things that "[glitter] or [flash] with colours which change according to the position from which they are viewed," such as wings of the Blue MorphoThe Blue Morpho Morpho menelaus is a beautifully irridescent tropical butterfly of the central and south American regions. Nymphalidae. butterfly, the iridescent feathers of a peacock, the light collecting tapetum lucidumThe tapetum lucidum ( Latin: "bright carpet") or tapetum is a reflecting layer behind the retina of the eye; it serves to reflect light back to the retina, increasing the quantity of light caught by the retina. This improves vision in low light conditions of many nocturnal species, and the iridophores of bioluminescent squid (e.g. the Bobtail squidIdiosepiidae Sepiolidae Classification CLASS CEPHALOPODA Subclass Nautiloidea: nautilus Subclass Coleoidea: squid, octopus, cuttlefish Superorder Decapodiformes Order Spirulida: Ram's Horn Squid Order Sepiida: cuttlefish Order Sepiolida bobtail squid Fami).