Types Of Anti-Reflective Treatments And When To Use Them

By DR. MICHAEL FINK

From the benign annoyance of a reflection off your car's instrument panel window to the image-destroying reflections off of multiple optical components in a microscope, unwanted reflections plague our lives. Minimizing reflections has become a multimillion dollar industry. Scientific instruments with several optical components, such as modern confocal microscopes and, more commonly, television cameras, would be far less useful without the benefit of anti-reflective coatings.

More than 70 years have passed since the first anti-reflective coating was discovered by a Ukrainian scientist working for Zeiss in Germany. While the anti-reflective coating was first implemented on binoculars in the German military, the new finding quickly expanded to a wide variety of optical elements in the research laboratory.