optique

Chemical reactions are determined at their most fundamental level by their respective electronic structure and dynamics. Steered by a stimulus such as light irradiation, electrons rearrange themselves in liquids or solids. This process takes only a few hundred attoseconds, whereby one attosecond is the billionth part of a billionth of a second.

Thin films are thin coating layers present in many different technologies. Despite their widespread use, most of the focus is around how they provide a barrier to various stimuli, or how they can be used as a conductive medium. However, there is another class of thin films that we will discuss, and these are optical thin films.