Abstract

An imperfect optical component between the polarizer and analyzer is replaced by its ideal counterpart and an imperfection-containing plate. Such a procedure allows use of a previous analysis of imperfections in cell windows to deal with other component imperfections, excluding depolarization. For the conventional ellipsometric arrangement with the compensator set before reflection at ±π/4 azimuth to give near π/2 retardation, two-zone averaging yields a correct value of the ratio of the diagonal reflection coefficients in the presence of small spurious off-diagonal reflectances, i.e., the effects of p ↔ s coherent scattering due to specimen roughness, optical activity, etc., cancel in a two-zone average. A procedure is developed for correcting the effects of optical activity and birefringence in compensators, which do not cancel upon averaging over two conjugate zones. The one significant off-diagonal element in the analyzer Jones matrix does not appear in two-zone averages, to first order.

© 1971 Optical Society of America

Ellipsometry with Imperfect Components Including Incoherent Effects*

R. M. A. Azzam and N. M. Bashara
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 61(10) 1380-1391 (1971)

Unified Analysis of Ellipsometry Errors Due to Imperfect Components, Cell-Window Birefringence, and Incorrect Azimuth Angles*

R. M. A. Azzam and N. M. Bashara
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 61(5) 600-607 (1971)

General Treatment of the Effect of Cell Windows in Ellipsometry*

R. M. A. Azzam and N. M. Bashara
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 61(6) 773-776 (1971)

Measurement and Correction of First-Order Errors in Ellipsometry

D. E. Aspnes
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 61(8) 1077-1085 (1971)

Analysis of systematic errors in rotating-analyzer ellipsometers*

R. M. A. Azzam and N. M. Bashara
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 64(11) 1459-1469 (1974)