AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition
    Spectroscopic Ellipsometry Focus Topic Thursday Sessions
       Session EL+AS+EM+MS+TF-ThA

Invited Paper EL+AS+EM+MS+TF-ThA1
Developments in Spectroscopic Ellipsometry for Characterization of Organic and Inorganic Surfaces, Interfaces and Complex Layered Materials

Thursday, October 21, 2010, 2:00 pm, Room Cochiti

Session: Spectroscopic Ellipsometry
Presenter: M. Schubert, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Correspondent: Click to Email
In this paper we will review new developments in Spectroscopic Ellipsometry for characterization of organic and inorganic surfaces, interfaces and complex layered materials. Ellipsometry has matured over the past two decades with instrumentation and methodology capable of addressing today’s and tomorrow’s challenges in materials characterization and metrology. Ellipsometry measures the general state of polarization of light reflected or transmitted from samples. Owing to its nondestructive and generally applicable concept of investigating light emerging from specimens under investigations, and owing to its extreme accuracy and precision, ellipsometry has paved the way for almost all our modern technologies, continues to enable next-generation devices in electronics and optoelectronics, and emerges into fields of chemical, biochemical and biological platform technologies. Originating from the identification that the information carried upon the polarization within a light beam emerging from surfaces is extremely sensitive to mono and submonolayer characteristics, ellipsometry started decades ago pioneering development of microprocessors and electronic devices, which still today are based on planar thin film technology. Without ellipsometry, today’s computation and information technology would be still in its infancy. In this paper, emerging developments and applications for metrology of optical and electrical properties of semiconductors and nanostructures by Terahertz Magnetooptic generalized ellipsometry, also referred to as the Optical Hall effect, will be highlighted. Examples will include state-of-the-art nitride semiconductor device structures and epitaxial graphene, candidates for tomorrow’s next-generation devices. Likewise, new approaches for characterizing precise structural, magnetic and optical properties of three-dimensional nanostructure hybrid materials will be discussed. Examples will describe how ellipsometry characterization enables understanding and tailoring of electromagnetic properties of materials created by human intelligence, rather than by nature. New horizons are being explored currently by combining ellipsometry with independent surface sensitive techniques, such as acoustic Quartz-Crystal microbalance techniques. Combinations allow for identification of new information not accessible otherwise. Examples include observation of in-situ formation of self-assembled monolayers, protein adsorption onto sensitized surfaces, and formation of micelle-assisted bilayer configurations. Prospects, challenges and future developments will be reviewed from today’s perspective.