Case Study: 633 nm V-Coat B270 Glass

Case Study: Highly Durable Sputtered V-Coat, Anti-Reflection Coatings for Increased Laser Damage Thresholds.

V-Coats have a narrow but very high peak transmission often above 99.5% (when 2 sides ae coated)making them highly desirable for laser applications. In this instance the lens was being used with a 633nm laser, so the coating had to be robust enough to withstand the lasers high energy.

At Vortex all of our coatings are sputtered as opposed to evaporated. One of the main benefits of this is that they have far superior environmental properties such as greater resistance to abrasion, humidity, water exposure and laser damage thresholds. The reason for this is that sputtered coatings are deposited with a much higher process energy (1000 times higher than evaporation). This results in a coating with a much higher density and fewer voids in the coating meaning that the coating is more temperature stable, has less angular shift and more environmentally tough. The diagram below shows some more detail about the benefits of sputtering vs evaporation.