Design of optical notch filters using apodized thickness modulation.

An apodized thickness design method for discrete layer notch filters is presented. The method produces error tolerant designs with low ripple in the passband regions without any additional numerical optimization. Several apodization functions including Gaussian, cosine squared, as well as quintic are considered. Theoretical and experimental results from ion beam deposited sample designs for single-notch as well as multinotch filters are presented. Good agreement is observed between the theoretical design and the experimental measurement even when the deposition process is only controlled on time. This demonstrates the low layer error sensitivity of the apodized designs.