Unevenly spaced continuous measurement approach for dual rotating–retarder Mueller matrix ellipsometry

© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement. In order to efficiently extract the sample Mueller matrix by dual rotating-retarder ellipsometry, it is critical for the data reduction technique to achieve a minimal data processing burden while consideri...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Meng, Kai, Jiang, Bo, Samolis, Christos D, Alrished, Mohamad, Youcef-Toumi, Kamal
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: The Optical Society 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/136204
Description
Summary:© 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement. In order to efficiently extract the sample Mueller matrix by dual rotating-retarder ellipsometry, it is critical for the data reduction technique to achieve a minimal data processing burden while considering the ease of retarder control. In this paper, we propose an unevenly spaced sampling strategy to reach a globally optimal measurement matrix with minimum sampling points for continuous measurements. Taking into account the robustness to both systematic errors and detection noise, we develop multi-objective optimization models to identify the optimal unevenly spaced sampling points. A combined global search algorithm based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm is subsequently designed to solve our model. Finally, simulations and experiments are conducted to validate our approach as well as to provide near-optimal schemes for different design scenarios. The results demonstrate that significant improvement on error immunity performance can be achieved by applying an unevenly sampled measurement strategy compared to an evenly sampled one for our ellipsometer scenario.