Filtering properties of defect-bearing periodic and triadic cantor multilayers

Defect-bearing periodic as well as pre-fractal dielectric multilayers can be designed to operate as narrow-band filters. For the same dielectric constituents and the same (or closest to same) number of layers, pre-fractal structures are remarkably better than the periodic ones, both in terms of filter bandwidth and transmittance peak, and are less sensitive to variations in the defect thickness. For structures having about 30 layers, optical losses do not significantly affect the filtering features of both morphologies if the loss tangent of the constituent materials is less than 10−5.