Development of Interferometric Mueller Matrix Ellispometer for Characterizing Properties of the Photonic and Biomedical Materials

It is frequently used to characterize an unknown material through polarized light-material interaction, which can be described by Mueller-Stokes calculus. In principle, the Mueller matrix elements of a tested specimen can be measured by an instrumental setup, thus its properties can be analyzed well. In this proposal, two system setup developed for measuring the physical properties of various specimen are proposed. In the first year of this research project, we will develop an interferometric transmission ellipsometer (ITE) for characterization of a generalized birefringent material by measuring part of its Mueller matrix elements. In the second year of this research project, we will develop an interferometric Mueller matrix ellipsometer (IMME) which is able to measure all 15 normalized Mueller matrix elements of an unknown specimen is proposed. The complete theory and work principle of ITE and IMME were derived. IMME incorporates with heterodyne interferometer and conventional Mueller matrix ellipsometer (MME). Meanwhile, a dual-frequency, equal amplitude and zero phase retardation of orthogonal linear polarizations laser beam is developed and utilized as an incident beam of the developing system, which can greatly reduce the scattering effect, resulting from the specimen. Complete and part of the Mueller matrix elements of a specimen are measurable in terms of the amplitude of the detected heterodyne signal at different orientation of optical components in IMME and ITE respectively. So that the high accuracy measurement and low noise signal detection can be achieved by using narrow band filtering technique.

Project ID:PB10011-0102
External Project ID:NSC100-2218-E182-006