Thin-Film Optics Tutorials

Each tutorial is a live mini-application sharing the multilayer.app transfer-matrix engine: adjust the design, read the computed metrics, inspect the spectrum and appearance color, and open the exact stack in the full calculator. The surface-texture pages add the analytic geometry a patterned interface needs, and hand the structure itself to the calculator's rigorous coupled-wave and ray-tracing solvers.

Design tutorials

Anti-reflection coating Cancel front-surface reflection with a single quarter-wave MgF₂ layer on glass. Bragg mirror / DBR A distributed Bragg reflector — many quarter-wave pairs for near-unity reflectance. Thin film on thick substrate Coherent coating on an incoherent substrate, with the electric-field profile. Fabry–Pérot etalon A cavity between two mirrors: transmission peaks, free spectral range, and finesse. Bandpass / notch filter An all-dielectric single-cavity filter with a narrow, tunable passband. Beam splitter A thin silver film at 45° splitting a beam toward 50/50, with the s/p split. Surface plasmon resonance Kretschmann excitation of a surface plasmon at a metal–dielectric interface. Low-emissivity / solar-control glass Thin silver between dielectrics: visible-transparent, infrared-reflective glass. Radiative cooling emitter A SiO₂/Si₃N₄ emitter on silver radiating heat through the 8–13 µm sky window. Perovskite solar cell Optical absorption in a perovskite photovoltaic layer stack.

Surface texture

Diffraction grating orders Which orders propagate, where the zero-order cutoff falls, and the form birefringence below it. Pyramid texture & light trapping Facet-local Fresnel and the second bounce that makes a textured wafer look black. Moth-eye taper A sub-wavelength taper sliced into Bruggeman effective-medium layers, against a quarter-wave coating.