Abstracts Physics

Highly Transparent Glass using Nanoparticle Films for Enhanced Optoelectronics

by Yi Yang Joel Loh

This thesis provides an investigation and review of homogeneous multilayer anti-reflective coatings (ARC) on glass. Recently, numerical optimization has become popular in optimizing the number of layers at a defined wavelength range and at angular incident angles. In this investigation, the design of the index profile is optimized for normal incident angle and angular incident angles by an evolutionary genetic algorithm. The anti-reflective coatings consist of multilayer porous silica or tin oxide nanoparticle films, which are fabricated by mixing 10nm silica nanoparticle or 10nm tin oxide nanoparticle colloidal solutions with varying amounts of 50nm polystyrene colloidal solutions, followed by spin coating on a glass substrate, and sintering at 400˚C for 40 minutes, which burns off the embedded polystyrene and renders a voided matrix. Experiments were carried out to produce ARCs based on well-known index profiles, and based on genetic algorithm optimization