ABSTRACT
The subject of this chapter is the optics of thin films, deposited on a dielectric substrate. About seven decades ago, Abeles was among the early workers who applied a matrix technique to analyzing thin films in order to determine the reflectivity and transmissivity thereof. In the early 1950s, Born and Wolf reformulated the matrix method so elegantly that it attained widespread use. With the advent of modern computation technologies, at the professional and personal levels, the determination of basic film properties such as reflectivity and transmissivity of single or multiple layers using this method has become a common practice.
