Metal Mirrors for Ultrafast Applications

Metal layers of aluminum, silver or gold have the advantage of reflecting light over a wide bandwidth on the one hand and not changing the phase position of the individual waves relative to each other on the other. For this reason, metal mirrors are ideal for the beam guidance of short-pulse lasers.

Additional dielectric coating protects a metal layer against chemical reactions with air components (oxygen, sulfur) with long-term stability. At the same time, the reflectivity can be increased in a limited spectral range, while the phase response remains almost unaffected.

Such reflection-enhanced metal mirrors are also frequently used as scanner optics.