Lower bound on the thickness of broadband dielectric mirrors

Abstract

We present a lower bound on the total physical thickness of a lossless, non-dispersive dielectric mirror for a given minimum reflectance across a wavelength band. The bound is based on a causality-based sum rule translated from a known result in acoustics, that expresses the wavelength integral of the logarithmic transmission of any lossless one-dimensional refractive-index profile as a function of the total thickness of each material comprising the profile, independent of how the layers are arranged. Calculating the thickness bound for a dielectric mirror, given some incident medium and substrate, requires only the lowest and highest refractive indices used in the thin-film stack and the minimum desired reflectance for a given wavelength span. We find that (1) the bound is set by the wavelength span so, for example, a 400-700 nm and an 800-1100 nm mirror have the same bound; (2) the figure of merit for materials minimizing the necessary thickness is $(n_H-n_L)^2/(n_H+n_L)$, where $n_H$ and $n_L$ are the indices of the high- and low-index materials; and (3) each additional "nine" of reflectance (e.g., from 99% to 99.9%) requirement adds a fixed amount of additional thickness to the bound. Non-exhaustive numerical calculations show that the readily achievable thickness is about twice our bound.