Characterization of Nanocrystals Using Spectroscopic Ellipsometry

First applications of ellipsometry to the measurement of polyand nanocrystalline thin films date back to many decades. The most significant step towards the ellipsometric investigation of composite thin films was the realization of the first spectroscopic ellipsometers in the ’70s [3, 4, 8], which allowed the measurement of the dielectric function, the imaginary part of which is directly related to the joint density of electronics states sensitively depending upon the changes of the crystal structure. The first models were based on the effective medium approach using constituents of known dielectric functions [5], whereas the volume fraction of the components can be related to the crystal properties of the thin films. This approach is popular ever since, based on its robustness.