Determination of the crystallographic orientation of cubic media to high resolution using optical harmonic generation

Using the tensorial characteristic of optical harmonic generation it is shown that the crystallographic orientation of centrosymmetric and noncentrosymmetric cubic media can be determined to within ±0.1°. As an illustration of the technique the orientation of vicinal GaAs(001) and Si(111) single-crystal wafers is obtained using second- and third-harmonic generation, respectively, with a continuously mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser operating at 775 nm. Intensity measurements were taken as a function of the wafer azimuthal angle and are fit to a truncated Fourier series derived from a phenomenological theory.