Design High Efficient Reflectivity of Distributed Bragg Reflectors

Abstract

Bragg Reflectors consist of periodic dielectric layers having an optical path length of quarter wavelength for each layer giving them important properties and makes them suitable for optoelectronics applications. The reflectivity can be increased by increasing the number of layers of the mirror to get the required value. For example for an 8 layers Bragg mirror (two layers for each dielectric pair), the contrast of the refractive index has to be equal to 0.275 for reaching reflectivity > 99%. Doubling the number of layers results in a reflectivity of 99.99%. The high reflectivity is purely caused by multiple-interference effects. It can be analyzed by using different matrix methods such as the transfer matrix method (TMM) which is the simplest method to study the characteristic of devices with different alternating layers.