Corrosion characterization of durable silver coatings by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and accelerated environmental testing

Highly reflective front-surface silver mirrors are needed for many optical applications. While various protective dielectric coating schemes have been developed, the long-term durability of Ag mirrors is still of great concern in the optics community for a variety of applications under harsh environments. The corrosion protection behavior of a SiNx-coated silver-mirror coating scheme was tested with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and accelerated environmental testing, including humidity and salt fog tests. The EIS data obtained were fitted with different equivalent circuit models. The results suggested that the 100Å thick SiNx coating produced by rf magnetron sputtering was porous and acted as a leaky capacitor on the Ag film, whereas the addition of a NiCrNx interlayer as thin as 3Å between SiNx and Ag films resulted in a much denser SiNx coating with a low-frequency impedance value of 2 orders of magnitude higher than that without the interlayer. Humidity and salt fog testing of different silver coatings showed similar results. The 100Å SiNx/3Å-NiCrNx/Ag coating exhibited excellent corrosion resistance against the corrosive environments used in this study.