Reflection and transmission of obliquely incident light by chiral sculptured thin films fabricated using asymmetric serial-bideposition technique

Chiral sculptured thin films (STFs) were grown using the asymmetric serial-bideposition (ASBD) technique, whereby (i) two subdeposits of unequal heights are separated by a substrate rotation of 180 deg about the central normal axis, and (ii) consecutive subdeposit pairs are separated by a small substrate rotation δ on the order of a few degrees. Eight samples were prepared with subdeposit heights in ratios of 1:1, 1.5:1, 2:1, 2.5:1, 3:1, 5:1, 7:1, and 9:1. A finely ambichiral STF was also grown. All nine samples were grown with the same vapor flux direction and to have 10 periods with the same thickness. The spectrums of all eight circular remittances of every sample were measured over a wide range of incidence angle θinc. Redshifting and narrowing of the circular Bragg regime was observed with increasing subdeposit-height ratio for all values of θinc, arriving at a limit with the 9:1 sample. The finely ambichiral sample has a circular Bragg regime similar to that of the 9:1 sample, but the latter exhibits much better discrimination between incident left circularly polarized light and right circularly polarized light than the former for θinc larger than about 20 deg.