Conference Agenda

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopic ellipsometry (THz-TDSE) provides several advantages and opens a wide range of applications in optical metrology. We demonstrate the measurement of complete ellipsometric spectral response in terms of the Jones or Mueller matrix based on polarization switching by using a spintronic THz emitter (STE). The general method is demonstrated on THz-TDSE of anisotropic crystal of Mercury Chloride (Calomel). Applications of THz-TDSE in the field of THz optical activity and contactless measurement of surface electric properties are proposed.

An imaging Mueller matrix ellipsometer is used to measure structures in measuring fields in the micrometre range, which are too small for conventional ellipsometry. Line and grid structures are measured and evaluated with the help of numerical simulations using the finite element method to characterize the structure parameters.

We present the impact of line edge roughness (LER) on the optical critical dimension (OCD) metrology of nanostructures. The consideration of LER in OCD requires numerically expensive forward models and is therefore usually neglected. We present an analytical approach that allows estimation of the impact on the uncertainty. Systematic differences between CD measured by SEM and OCD were observed in different experiments. While SEM is basically sensitive to the local volume density, optical methods are sensitive to the permittivity of the material. We discuss an analytical upper bound on the contribution of the LER. For high index gratings, the contribution is as high as 3.7 nm for TM-polarized light and 1.2 nm for TE-polarized light, making this crucial for sub-nanometer metrology.

Gold gratings were measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry and modeled by the finite element method to investigate the capabilities of optical dimensional metrology for plasmonic diffractive structures. The gratings were prepared by electron beam lithography using parameters determined by finite element simulations for significant variations of the amplitude ratio and phase shift of the polarized reflection coefficients to achieve high sensitivity for both the measurement of the grating dimensions and the sensing capabilities. Sub-nanometer sensitivity was shown to determine the grating dimensions and the thickness of an adsorbed layer to be detected in both traditional reflection and Kretschmann-Raether (KR) configurations. The sensitivity for the refractive index of the ambient was calculated to be 10$^{-5}$ at best, which is not significantly better than the sensitivities for plane gold layers in KR configurations. However, in diffraction-based resonant setups, the high sensitivity dips can be shifted to a larger spectral range, which is highly significant in many applications. It was also revealed that 2D models assuming a perfect geometry fit the measured ellipsometry spectra only qualitatively, leaving room for model development in the future.

In the pursuit of closing the gap between nanometrology and nanofabrication, we investigate the use of advanced optical far field methods for sub-wavelength parameter reconstruction. With the goal of establishing a hybrid evaluation scheme connecting different methods and including different information channels, we performed comparison measurements on a silicon line grating sample with buried as well as not buried surface relief lines. To this end, the results of our measurement are in good agreements with each other, and the collected structure data is feasible to be used for hybrid evaluation.