Quantum ellipsometry

Ellipsometry is a technique in which the polarization of light is used to determine the optical properties of a material (sample) and infer information such as the thickness of a thin film. Traditional ellipsometric measurements are limited in their accuracy because of the use of an external reference sample for calibration, and because of the quantum noise inherent in the source that becomes important at low light levels. A new technique called quantum ellipsometry is investigated, and is shown to circumvent these limitations by using a non-classical source of light, namely, twin photons generated by the process of spontaneous parametric downconversion (SPDC), in conjunction with a novel polarization interferometer and coincidence-counting detection scheme.; Quantum ellipsometry comes in two forms: correlated-photon and entangled-photon ellipsometry. Both ellipsometric techniques yield estimated of the sample reflectance/transmittance with accuracy greater than conventional ellipsometry. Specifically, when the quantum efficiencies of the detectors used are above a certain threshold the signal-to-noise ratio of the measured ellipsometric parameters is larger for quantum ellipsometry than for conventional ellipsometry. This is because the photon pairs generated by SPDC have a fully correlated joint photon counting distribution. Furthermore, both correlated-photon and entangled-photon ellipsometry have the added advantage that they do not require calibration by an external reference sample, which is another limitation on the accuracy for most conventional ellipsometry. Quantum ellipsometry exploits the property of photon number correlation and polarization entanglement. The entanglement property, inherent in entangled-photon ellipsometry, is shown to allow for the movement of the optical elements that precede the sample to the sample-free optical channel in the setup.; A theoretical and experimental investigation of quantum ellipsometry was conducted. Both correlated-photon and entangled-photon ellipsometers were constructed. The former technique was implemented using the type-I version of SPDC in which the emitted photon pairs have parallel polarizations. The latter approach was implemented using the type-II version of SPDC, which is characterized by the non-classical property of polarization entanglement. Experiments were carried out on both bulk silicon and gallium arsenide samples, and were found to be in agreement with theoretical expectations, demonstrating the feasibility of both techniques.