Applied Nanophotonics, Liquid Crystals and Biomedical Optics

Optical scatterometry is being used as a powerful technique for measurement of sub-wavelength periodic structures. It is based on measuring the scattered signal and solving the inverse scattering problem. For periodic nano-arrays with feature size less than 100nm, it is possible to simplify the electromagnetic simulations using the Rytov near quasi-static approximation valid for feature periods only few times less than the wavelength. This is shown to be adequate for the determination of the structure parameters from the zero order reflected or transmitted waves and their polarization or ellipsometric properties. The validity of this approach is applied to lamellar nano-scale grating photo-resist lines on Si substrate. Formulation for structures containing anisotropic multilayers is presented using the 4x4 matrix approach.