Scanning Ellipsometer Using a Fixed Phase Retarder and Rotating Polarizer and Analyzer

Rotating analyzer–fixed analyzer ellipsometer based on null type ellipsometer

The theory and design of an inexpensive rotating analyzer unit is presented, which allows a conventional null type ellipsometer to work as rotating analyzer–fixed analyzer automatic ellipsometer, without sacrificing the possibility to work in null mode. The mode switching is performed simply by adding or removing the rotating analyzer from its holder. It is shown that the rotating analyzer phas...

Zone-averaged method to minimize polarizer and analyzer imperfections in a phase-modulated spectroscopic ellipsometer

We have theoretically investigated the effects of polarizer and analyzer imperfections in a phase-modulated spectroscopic ellipsometer adopting a photoelastic modulator. Jones matrices having off-diagonal elements have been introduced to represent the imperfections of the polarizer and analyzer, and the effects of the imperfections were analytically derived to the first-order approximation. It ...

Poincaré sphere representation of the fixed-polarizer rotating-retarder optical system.

The trajectory of the polarization state of a monochromatic light beam after it passes through a fixed linear polarizer and a rotating linear retarder of arbitrary retardance delta is determined on the Poincaré sphere. The three-dimensional figure-8 contour is shown to be the line of intersection of a right-circular cylinder with the sphere. The cylinder is parallel to the polar (S3) axis, touc...

Single-element rotating-polarizer ellipsometer for film-substrate systems

Optimizing the precision of a multichannel three-polarizer spectroscopic ellipsometer.

We developed a multichannel three-polarizer spectroscopic ellipsometer based on a data acquisition algorithm for achieving optimized precision. This algorithm measures unnormalized Fourier coefficients accurately and precisely. Offset angles for optical elements were obtained as wavelength-independent values using regression calibration. Derived subsets of data reduction functions were used to ...