Optical and structural properties of Fe 2O 3 thin films prepared by ion-beam assisted deposition

Abstract

We studied the optical and structural properties of Fe 2O 3 thin films deposited by conventional evaporation and ion-beam assisted deposition (IBAD). In IBAD, the anode voltage and filament current were varied to investigate the properties of Fe 2O 3 thin films. It is found that the refractive index of Fe 2O 3 thin films deposited by ion-beam assisted deposition is higher than that by electron-beam deposition, and Fe 2O 3 films are more stable and denser after heat treatment. Fe 2O 3 has a high refractive index as well as a high absorption at short wavelength region among conventional high refractive index materials. Therefore, for a long-wave pass filter, it has an advantage of not only reducing the total number of layers, but also absorbing the short wavelength light. As an application, long-wave pass filters of 12-layers were also fabricated by using electron-beam deposition and ion-beam assisted deposition. The long-wave pass filter by IBAD shows the excellent optical and mechanical properties after annealing. It indicates that the long-wave pass filters using IBAD Fe 2O 3 thin films can be widely used to the surfaces for high temperature applications.