Low-cost fabrication of large area sub-wavelength anti-reflective structures on polymer film using a soft PUA mold

A soft lithographic approach using a modified polyurethane acrylate (PUA) mold for the fabrication of sub-wavelength antireflective structure on polymer film is reported. By introducing an intermediate transferring PUA mold generated by an anodized aluminum oxide membrane, there is no need either to heat nor to deposit metal as a seed layer. Therefore, the most costly and time-consuming master preparation step in the conventional process chain is not a necessity. The soft PUA mold provides a high resolution of 100 nm with an aspect ratio of 1.7 and a conformal contact with the substrate and reduces the pressure needed during the imprinting steps. It is numerically verified that the antireflective film with nanopores has a similar fascinating broadband antireflective effect compared with that of its complementary nanonipple one. In our experiment, the average transmission efficiency of the PET film with dual-side nanopores can be enhanced to 98.7% at normal incidence and 92.5% at an incident angle of 60° over a range of 400~800 nm of the spectrum. The proposed method is simple and cost-effective and the fabricated antireflective polymer film can be mounted on the surfaces of various optical devices for the reduction of Fresnel reflections.