Text version of the page

The Nanolayers Optical Coatings Story

Nanolayers GmbH specializes in solutions in the field of optical coatings. Beginning with the optical concept and moving through the design review of the coating layers specific to the customer’s needs, the requirements of the customer are fine tuned. With their flexible process production techniques they are able to meet the demands of non- standard coding requirements. The NANEO Process: The high quality of the NANEO series is due to its manufacturing process, ion beam sputtering (IBS). No other coating process allows process parameters such as energy, growth rate and oxidation number to be set precisely and independently from one another. Using this process, the coating material is bombarded with noble gas ions. The impinging ions sputter off particles of coating materials as dust, which deposits as metal on the object to be coated. By adding oxygen, one gets a deposition of the corresponding metal oxide.Due to their high kinetic energy, the sputtered atoms are extremely mobile, whereby displacements are curedand any defects in the accumulating particle film are eliminated. This results in extremely smooth and homogenous layers in regards to the optical properties of the product.Several 100 layers can be put on top of one another using this method, thereby transforming the substrates into optical components with complex functionality and the highest quality standards.The advantage of ion beam sputteringcompared to other coating processes is in its extremely low intrinsic absorption of the layers together with a very high long-term stability of their optical properties. This means that the optics absorb less light and increase the performance of the product for the same complexity of the layer system (i.e. number of layers) obtained. Or with comparable absorption and dispersion you can increase the optical functionality using a bigger layer system.
x