| Using an advanced thin film fabrication technique known as Glancing Angle Deposition (GLAD), it is possible to fabricate unique thin film nanostructures with characteristic dimensions on the order of a wavelength of light. By tailoring the morphologies of the films, they can be designed to exhibit particular optical properties that can be customized through advanced substrate motion and highly oblique flux incidence angles. In applications to photonics, controlling the flow of light for a specified task, GLAD thin films can be fabricated to provide the ability to manipulate incident light through controlled interactions of optical frequency electromagnetic radiation with the thin film nanostructures. Tetragonal square spiral photonic band gap crystals, a new class of periodic dielectric material that is characterized by the elimination of the density of states for frequencies lying in the stop gap of the crystal, can be fabricated using GLAD in a virtual single step process. The design and fabrication of these unique devices has been performed and the resultant crystals characterized in terms of optical response with respect to forbidden propagation modes, material properties, and advanced deposition techniques used to improve the overall structure. Chiral or helical thin films deposited using GLAD were also investigated, and have been shown to exhibit optical activity and circular birefringence due to their inherent structural anisotropy. It has been shown that the addition of nematic liquid crystals (LCs) to chiral thin films enhances the overall device performance due to order induced in the LCs by the film structure. This effect was investigated for a variety of materials and film structures. Finally, by developing a modified GLAD technique whereby the deposited film porosity is controlled through the angle of flux incidence, porous broadband antireflection coatings were produced. Using an appropriate effective medium theory to describe the index of refraction profile of the coating in terms of the local film density, a model was developed to aid in the design and fabrication of graded index GLAD antireflection films. |
