Highly Reflective Silver-Enhanced Coating with High Adhesion and Sulfurization Resistance for Telescopes

Highly reflective metal coatings are essential for manufacturing reflecting telescope mirrors to achieve the highest reflectivity with broad spectral bandwidth. Among metallic materials, enhanced silver-based coatings can provide higher reflectivity in the 400–500 nm spectral range to better performance from visible to near IR. Moreover, over-coating a dielectric protective layer on the mirror’s front side attains additional hardness and oxidation stability. In this paper, we study a combination of thermal and electron beam evaporation as a technology to form protected enhanced high reflective Ag coatings. A newly designed multiplayer film can pass ASTM 5B adhesive performance testing and give sulfurization inhibition. The average specular reflectivity for the enhancement coating is about 98% in wavelengths across the spectral range from 400–1000 nm. This innovation has been demonstrated on a Newtonian type telescope, with storage in an ambiance humidity H = 60–85%, and temperature T = 10–35 °C, for more than six months without degradation in coating performance.