Title: <title>Optical materials by a modified sol-gel nanoparticle process</title>
Abstract: Optical sol-gel materials have been of interest for many years. The reason is that through the preparation of sold with nanoparticulate liquid structures, transparent coatings of many inorganic oxides can be produced. By using oxides for example, with different refractive indices, reflective or antireflective coatings can be fabricated. To obtain stable layers, the gel coating have to be densified at higher temperatures, in general between 400 and 600 degrees C. This may be suitable for glass surfaces, but not for temperature sensitive substrates like plastics. In addition to this, if multilayer coatings have to be produced, between each step a densification process has to be carried out before the net coating step takes place. This leads to an unsatisfying situation if industrial low cost processing is required. In addition to this, the dip coating process is not suitable for high speed or large area coating techniques. This is one of the reasons whey the sol-gel process never has gained a real high significance for industrial coatings on glass and is limited to special products so far.