A method to measure thin-film thickness, refractive index, and dispersion constants based on white-light interferometry is described. The thin-film property is retrieved from the Fourier amplitude of the white-light correlogram. The sources of errors in Fourier amplitude, which include the accuracy of wave number, light source variation in time, and illumination nonuniformity, are investigated. With all these errors reduced, the film thicknesses and refractive indices of four samples measured by white-light interferometry are within 1% of the ellipsometry results.

Ta–Si oxide composite thin-film rugate filters were prepared by radio frequency ion-beam sputtering and their residual stress and substrate deflections were measured. The residual stress and substrate deflection of these composite film rugate filters were less than that of notch filters made from a series of discrete quarter-wave layers with alternate high and low indices because of the smooth modulation of composition and no interface structure of the rugate filter.

The traditional three-layered metal-dielectric-metal Fabry-Perot filter is developed as a new metal-dielectric multilayered band-pass filter. Our design method allows metal and dielectric films to be alternatively arranged to achieve a narrow and high transmission peak and the peak height remains unchanged for any number of metal films arranged in the multilayer. Furthermore, the equivalent refractive index of a subwavelength metal-dielectric multilayer could be negative real at the passband of the filter and such metamaterial exhibits stronger figure of merit than a previous result. By choosing a material with high refractive index as the dielectric film, such metamaterial exhibits a pass band that depends weakly on the angle of incidence.

A vibration-insensitive interferometer is described to measure the thickness, refraction index and surface profile of thin-film stack at normal incidence. By satisfying the continuous boundary conditions of electric and magnetic fields at interfaces in a multilayer film stack, the reflection coefficient phase of the thin-film stack can be distinguished from the phase of spatial path difference, thus thickness and refraction index can be extracted. The experiment results showed that the measurement precision is significantly increased after the phase analysis was added into the reflectance analysis.

Fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) films have been deposited by pulsed DC magnetron sputtering with an Sn target. Various ratios of ${\mathrm{CF}}_4/{\mathrm{O}}_2$ gas were injected to enhance the optical and electrical properties of the films. The extinction coefficient was lower than $1.5\times {10}^{-3}$ in the range from 400 to $800\mathrm{nm}$ when the ${\mathrm{CF}}_4/{\mathrm{O}}_2$ ratio was 0.375. The resistivity of fluorine-doped ${\mathrm{SnO}}_2$ films ($1.63\times {10}^{-3}\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{cm}$) deposited at $300°\mathrm{C}$ was 27.9 times smaller than that of undoped ${\mathrm{SnO}}_2$ ($4.55\times {10}^{-2}\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{cm}$). Finally, an FTO film was consecutively deposited for protecting the oxidation of indium tin oxide films. The resistivity of the double-layered film was $2.68\times {10}^{-4}\mathrm{\Omega }\mathrm{cm}$, which increased by less than 39% at a $450°\mathrm{C}$ annealing temperature for $1\mathrm{h}$ in air.

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