(376f) Self-Assembled Nanoparticle Anti-Glare Coatings

Light reflection from an optical surface, such as automotive dashboards and flat panel displays, could pose safety hazards, impair the legibility of displays, and degrade performance of optical systems with multiple optical components. Here we present a simple and scalable bottom-up technology for assembling close-packed nanoparticle monolayers on both sides of a glass substrate as high-quality anti-glare coatings. Optical measurements show that monolayer coatings consisting of 110 nm silica nanoparticles can significantly reduce optical reflectance and enhance specular transmittance of the glass substrate for a broad range of visible wavelengths. Both experiments and numerical simulations based on a finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) model reveal that the anti-glare properties of the self-assembled colloidal monolayers are significantly affected by the size of the colloidal nanoparticles. We further demonstrate that the self-assembled nanoparticle arrays can be used as structural templates for fabricating nanoporous polymer membranes with similar anti-glare performance. Tunable anti-glare coatings have also been achieved by using templated nanoporous membranes consisting of solvent-sensitive shape memory polymers