nm- and mu m-Scale Surface Roughness on Glass with Specific Optical Scattering Characteristics on Demand

During maskless ion etching of amorphous glass, self-organization can arise in certain etch parameter ranges, which leads to dense-lying dots/cones with typical diameters and heights in the 30-300 nm range. Another phenomenon, which results in cone sizes around 1 mu m or more, is self-masking especially in the case of heterogeneous glasses like borosilicate glass as used in this contribution. Thus, a wide range of characteristic sizes and shapes of individual scatterers on the glass surface, jointly acting as a defined roughness, can be achieved resulting in specific optical scattering characteristics. This contribution gives results on borosilicate thin-glass dry etching. Certain surface morphologies are reported together with experimental results on their optical scattering characteristics. Copyright (C) 2007 Henning Fouckhardt et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.