Protective coatings for front surface silver mirrors by atomic layer deposition

The problem of protection of the front surface silver mirrors is a very important one for a number of applications. The atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique provides an efficient way to form a coating, protecting the sensitive surface of silver from a corrosive and oxidizing environment. Moreover, the ALD layer provides extremely high conformality (even when deposited over high aspect ratio features) and has high integrity, efficiently blocking foreign species diffusion to the silver-overcoat interface. We tested the efficiency of the protection of silver mirrors against oxygen plasma exposure by the ALD-deposited Al2O3 layers by combining spectroscopic ellipsometry, reflection measurements and pulsed glow-discharge optical emission spectroscopy (GD-OES) profiling. We have found that for optimal protection, the thickness of the ALD deposited layer should exceed at least 15 nm (about 150 ALD cycles at 150 degrees C). We have also demonstrated that the deposition of 15 nm of a protective ALD-deposited Al2O3 layer does not affect the absolute reflectivity of a silver mirror in the spectral range 320 -2500 nm. (C) 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement