Fabrication of polymeric multilayers and their applications for optically functional devices

Abstract

Optical multilayers have been fabricated by the vacuum-evaporation and the sputtering of inorganic dielectric materials for use as passive optical elements such as high-reflection mirrors, interference wavelength filters and antireflection thin films. Recently, we succeeded in the fabrication of the multilayers by spin coating two polymers under control of the optical thickness of each layer, making it possible to construct various optically active devices by introducing functional molecules into the layers.