Abstract

The emergence of new optical coating materials and new laser technologies in recent years has engendered a need to apply uniform, ultrathin coatings from liquid solutions onto large, heavy substrates. Examples of importance to LLNL's inertial confinement fusion program are sol-gel anti reflective coatings and multilayer high reflectors (HR's) made with sol-gel suspensions, large aperture diffraction gratings, and beam smoothing optics. Manufacture of each of these optics requires deposition of submicron-thickness coatings uniform to within a few percent across the entire clear aperture, which can be on the order of a square meter in size.

© 1995 Optical Society of America