Hafnium Oxide:

HfO2 is used extensively in high-damage threshold laser applications, and for its broad spectrum capabilities. Despite its wide range of uses, HfO2 still remains one of the most difficult coating materials to pre-melt and evaporate consistently from an E-beam deposition source. Pre-melting HfO2 may require several time consuming stages to achieve a dense, homogeneous pre-melted cone. Without proper cone density Hafnium Oxide is prone to tunneling which can adversely affect the vapor distribution, resulting in an unpredictable and unrepeatable precision thin-film coating.

Titanium Oxide:

TiO2 is widely used as high index thin-film coating source material. One of the unique properties of Titanium Oxide is the constantly changing index of the material itself throughout the evaporation process. Another common issue with evaporating TiO2 is spatter, commonly due to voids in the source material. Having consistent source materials is absolutely necessary to a repeatable precision thin-film coating. Both of these problems require a pre-melting process that is extremely well controlled. At Ultimate Index, we have developed and refined several manufacturing processes to optimize the performance of our E-beam deposition cones.