Design, production and reverse engineering of ultra-steep hot mirrors

We present the whole design-production chain of an ultra-steep hot mirror produced using the indirect monochromatic monitoring technique. The hot mirror without thin layers is designed utilizing the stochastic optimization procedure that takes in account upper and lower constraints for layer optical thickness. We produced the hot mirror with the ion-assisted electron beam deposition technique using indirect monochromatic monitoring strategy, performed reverse engineering of the deposited coatings, and illustrated that the random variation of the tooling factors in low-index layers is the main factor causing production errors. We modified the monitoring strategy with low-index layers monitored by quartz crystal monitor, and demonstrated the excellent correspondence to the theoretical spectral performance.