Contamination-resistant silica antireflective coating with closed ordered mesopores

Porous silica optical antireflective (AR) coatings prepared by traditional sol-gel method have been extensively used for high power laser systems, but a serious drawback is that contamination existing in the high vacuum is easily absorbed by the disordered open pore structure, resulting in a fast decrease in transmittance. To improve the stability of transmittance in vacuum, a contamination-resistant silica AR coating with ordered mesopores completely closed by hydrophobic-oleophobic groups was successfully developed on a fused quartz substrate. The ordered mesopores in the coating were controlled under the direction of surfactant F127 via an evaporation-induced-self-assembling process and then were closed by post-grafting long chain fluoroalkylsilane. The grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) and the X-ray reflectivity (XRR) results indicated that the mesopores in the coating constructed a Fmmm orthorhombic symmetry structure with a (010) plane parallel to the substrate. Cage-like mesopores were confirmed by nitrogen adsorption-desorption analysis. The obtained coatings showed low surface roughness, excellent abrase-resistance and high transmittance of 100% on quartz substrate. Especially, the decrease of transmittance tested with polydimethylsiloxane pollution in vacuum within one-month was as small as 0.02%. The laser induced damage threshold was up to 59.8 J cm^-2 at a 12 ns laser pulse of 1053 nm wavelength. This work provides an alternative way to fabricate AR coatings with high stability.