Beginner Tutorials
Start with bare glass and progress through antireflection coatings, high reflectors, narrowband filters, and a 45° beamsplitter. Each tutorial ties one optical target to a runnable stack: learn the needed interference principle, build the structure, set the optics, run the calculation, and judge the result.
Afterward, you can explain the role of quarter-wave, multiple-beam interference, and oblique-incidence polarization; configure basic stacks; and use reflectance, transmittance, bandwidth, and polarization results to check a design.
Tutorial Catalog
- Your First Thin-Film Design: From Bare Glass to Broadband AR
- A Mirror Made of Transparent Materials: Design a 99% DBR
- Select One Color Between Two Mirrors: A Fabry–Pérot Narrowband Filter
- Separate Blue-Green and Red Light: Design a 45° Dichroic Beamsplitter
The table below summarizes the focus, software work, and quantitative result for each tutorial.
| Project | Optical principles | Software skills | Quantitative completion criterion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadband AR | Fresnel reflection, optical thickness, destructive interference | Structure, Optics, R/T, optimization | Average reflectance of about 0.087% over 450–650 nm |
| DBR mirror | Quarter-wave periodic stack, constructive interference, stopband | Layer Group, repeat count, spectral validation | Reflectance above 99% at 550 nm |
| Fabry–Pérot filter | Multiple-beam interference, resonance, linewidth | Mirror-symmetric ordering, fine wavelength step, FWHM | About 95.7% transmission at 550 nm and 3.62 nm FWHM |
| 45° dichroic | Oblique incidence, s/p splitting, multi-objective trade-offs | Two-band targets, bounds, polarization checks | Above 90% average blue-green reflection and red transmission |
After completing the current tutorials, continue to Case Studies and apply the same methods to published devices and more complex coatings.