A Study on the Anti-Reflection Coating Effects of Polymer Eyeglasses Lens

Reducing optical reflection in the visible light range, in order to increase the share of transmitted light and avoid the formation of ghost images in imaging, is important for polymer lens applications. In this study, polymer lenses with refractive indices of n=1.56, 1.60, and 1.67 were fabricated by the injection-molding method with a polymer lens monomer, dibutyltin dichloride as the catalyst and an alkyl phosphoric ester as the release agent. To investigate their anti-reflection (AR) effects, various AR coating structures, viz. a multi-layer AR coating structure, tri-layer AR coating structure with a discrete approximation Gaussian gradient-index profile, and tri-layer AR coating structure with a quarter-wavelength approximation, were designed and coated on the polymer lens by an E-beam evaporation system. The optical properties of the polymer lenses were characterized by UV-visible spectrometry. The material properties of the thin films, refractive index and surface roughness, were analyzed by ellipsometry and AFM, respectively. The most effective AR coating structure of the polymer lens with low refractive index, n=1.56, was the both side coating of multi-layer AR coating structure. However, both side coating of the tri-layered discrete approximation Gaussian gradient-index profile AR coating structure gave comparable results to the both side coating of the multi-layer AR coating structure for the polymer lens with a high refractive index of n=1.67.