Blue-blocking antireflective coatings based on a selective absorber in Cr2O3 media

Antireflection (AR) coatings allow increased substrate transmission and reduce surface reflection over a specific wavelength range. We proposed a blue-blocking (BB) AR coating that allows maximal visible-light transmittance while minimizing the transmittance of blue light, owing to selective absorption. Admittance diagrams of BB Cr2O3 / SiO2 coatings and traditional AR Ta2O5 / SiO2 coatings were shown to demonstrate that small absorption affects the reflectance much less than it affects the transmittance. Therefore, by controlling the degree of absorption, the lower residual reflection can be obtained by optimizing the thickness of different layers of the overall stacked structure. Coatings were fabricated using remote plasma sputtering to meet the requirements of low residual reflectance (<1.16 % ), high visible-light transmittance (exceeding 90%), and short-wavelength transmittance attenuation by ∼20 % . These promising results indicate that this type of BB coatings is a good candidate for vision protection applications, such as eyeglasses, desktop and mobile digital screens, and solar control films used in architectural glass.