Preparation and stress evolution of sol-gel SiO2 antireflective coatings for small-size anisotropic lithium triborate crystals

Bingtao Tian, Xiaodong Wang, Yanyan Niu, Jinlong Zhang, Qinghua Zhang, Zhihua Zhang, Guangming Wu, Bin Zhou, Jun Shen

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Lithium triborate (LiB3O5, LBO) crystal is now one of the most useful nonlinear optical materials for frequency conversion of high power lasers. The use of the crystal, however, has been hampered by the unavailability of antireflective (AR) coatings with high laser damage resistance. In this work, a "point contact" dip-coating method is developed to prepare sol-gel SiO2 AR coatings on small-size LBO crystals. Using this approach, we obtain a homogenous coating surface on an 8 mm×8 mm×3 mm LBO crystal. The stress measurements show that the stresses in sol-gel SiO2 coatings vary with the time of natural drying, which is beyond our expectation. The anisotropic Young's modulus of the LBO crystal and the different evolution tendency of the stress in the different SiO2 coating layers are found to be responsible for the crack of the double-layer AR coatings on anisotropic LBO crystal. Meanwhile, the resulting coatings on LBO crystal achieve a LIDT of over 15 J/cm2 (532 nm, 3ns) and the coated LBO is expected to have a transmittance of over 99% at 800 nm.

Original languageEnglish
Article number045208
JournalAIP Advances
Volume6
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2016
Externally publishedYes

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