15 Jun 2012 Jenoptik is making its first presentation of polymer optics with an innovative antireflective surface coating to suit a multitude of applications at last Optatec 2012. One of the few vendors in this business worldwide, the Optical Systems Division puts the special AR-plas® plasma-etching process for plastic optical surfaces with antireflective properties to industrial use. The main advantage of this method is that it can equally be applied to plane parts and to strongly curved optical lenses or also to irregular structures such as diffractive, refractive microoptics or microlens arrays. Even with strongly curved surfaces, reflection is suppressed uniformly and in a color-neutral fashion up to the very edge, especially where the angle of light incidence is greater. The process thus yields an enhanced anti-reflection effect against conventional anti-reflection coatings, while requiring little time and cost for implementation.
In an AR-plas® process, high-energy particles create nanostructures smaller than 100 nm under vacuum. These nanostructures offer reflectance-diminishing properties. Because there are no additional optical losses due to the structured nature of their surfaces, the transmittance of AR coated optics is clearly much better, which facilitates images of higher contrast and free of noise impacts.
The AR-plas® plasma-etch process has been developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering in Jena to be productionized at Jenoptik. This achievement of the team of scientists has been honoured with the 2012 Thuringian Research Award.
Potential applications of AR-coated optics include display covers in car dash boards or covers for head-up displays, phone displays and medical-engineering applications like endoscopy or monitoring cameras.
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