| AVS 64th International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Spectroscopic Ellipsometry Focus Topic | Monday Sessions |
| Session EL+AS+EM-MoA |
| Session: | Spectroscopic Ellipsometry: Novel Applications and Theoretical Approaches |
| Presenter: | Oriol Arteaga, Departament de Física Aplicada, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Interference phenomena are ubiquitous in optics and are the basis of the industry behind thin film optical coatings or thin film thickness measurements with ellipsometry. The interference of polarized beams was experimentally understood in 1819 when Arago and Fresnel derived the four laws governing the interference of polarized light. While spectroscopic ellipsometry provides information based on the position and number of interference oscillations in thin films, typically one has no macroscopic control of the beams that coherently superpose.
In this work we present a polarimetric analysis of an analogue of Young's double slit experiment that allows merging beams in a well-controlled manner. The experiment is analyzed with a new formalism that is useful to describe optical coherence and polarization and that shows that the superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable beams can be an effective method to experimentally synthesize Mueller matrices with on-demand polarization properties. This offers the opportunity of working with "synthesized" optical elements that behave just like "real" ones. We will discuss how this method can have a practical application in the construction of ellipsometers or polarimeters.