Superior refractive index tailoring properties in composite ZrO2/SiO2 thin film systems achieved through reactive electron beam codeposition process

Composite optical thin-film materials have received a significant amount of interest in order to relieve the material constraints on refractive indices as well as reducing the number of layers required in optical coating design. Amongst others binary zirconia-silica composite thin films have attracted considerable attentions due to their several favorable opto-mechanical properties. In the present studies such a composite system under certain compositional mixings displayed both refractive index and band gap supremacy over pure zirconia films violating the most popular Moss rule. This unexpected evolution has several practical applications one of which can be directly employed in extending the range of tunability of the refractive index. Besides, the probing of such a novel evolution through the analysis of ellipsometric refractive index modeling and morphological correlation functions has revealed several novel as well as superior microstructural properties in the composite thin film systems. All these characterization and analysis techniques distinctly indicate a strong interrelation between the microstructural ordering and superior optical properties of the present zirconia-silica codeposited composites.     

Contact metathesis polymerization (CMP)

Ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) has been used to investigate adhesive and coating formation via a general process called contact metathesis polymerization (CMP). This process involves applying a metathesis catalyst directly to the surface to be modified and initiating the polymerization by exposing this newly formed catalyst-coated surface to a monomer capable of undergoing ROMP, thereby creating an adhesive bond or coating. In this paper, we describe excellent primary adhesion results of bonding low surface energy elastomers to metals and themselves using ROMP as the operative chemistry. The elastomers natural rubber, EPDM, and Santoprene^® are difficult to bond using conventional methods, particularly in their post-vulcanized state. CMP yields rubber-tearing bonds to pre- and post-vulcanized elastomers at room temperature under ambient conditions in air, in the presence of moisture, and with minimal surface preparation using well-defined olefin metathesis catalysts.     

Relative performances of effective medium formulations in interpreting specific composite thin films optical properties

Several powerful effective medium formulations/approximation (EMA) and associated theories with different origins and concepts have been discussed and utilized here in order to model the experimental refractive index evolutions of ZrO₂-SiO₂ and Gd₂O₃-SiO₂ composite films with respect to their compositional mixings. Amongst these formulations, the Böttcher's generalized theory has been noticed to have more versatility and can simulate varieties of experimental observations incorporating a form factor parameter to account for the grain structure and morphology to a great extent. The refractive index modeling results of most of the available theories were compared with respect to their functional evolutions and limitations. It was noticed that at higher silica fractions (>20%) in our composite films, the effective experimental refractive index parameters have remained close to the most modeling results and Böttcher's expression has shown to fit the observable parameters very accurately. However, under low silica compositions (<20%) the refractive index values of the composite films depicted different functional evolutions. Such deviations have been attributed to the various morphological, grain structure and band gap supremacies observed in these specific composite films which are not accounted by the effective medium formulations and approximations. These observations are well supported by the atomic force microscopy results.