Scanning ellipsometer using a fixed phase retarder and rotating polarizer and analyzer

Ellipsometry have been widely used in thin film characterization. It has proven to be an extremely powerful tool to study the optical properties of materials with high optical data precision in measurement. Continuous efforts are conducted to develop different theoretical models and experimental ellipsometric techniques. Among the various configurations of spectroscopic ellipsometers (RPAEs), the model often used is the rotating analyzer ellipsometer [1]. Rotating polarizer analyzer ellipsometers in which the polarizer and the analyzer rotate with different speed ratios were proposed and constructed [2 6]. In this work, a spectroscopic RPAE with a fixed retarder with retardance δ is proposed. Hypothetical noise is assumed to be imposed on the signal received by the detector. The effect of the phase retarder in reducing the percent error in the optical constants extracted from the ellipsometric parameters is shown