A virtual microscope for simulation of Nanostructures

Light-matter interplay is widely used for analyzing the topology of surfaces on small scales for use in areas such as nanotechnology, nanoelectronics, photonics, and advanced materials. Conventional optical microscope imaging methods are limited in resolution to a value comparable to the wavelength, the so-called Abbe limit, and cannot be used to measure nano-sized structures. Scatterometry is an optical method that can measure structures smaller than the wavelength. However, the relative uncertainties of the structure dimensions measured with scatterometry increase with decreasing structure size, and the industry is therefore looking for replacing simple intensity based scatterometry with a phase-sensitive measurement method such as coherent Mueller ellipsometry. In this work, we present a virtual microscope capable of simulating the coherent Mueller ellipsometry and scatterometry response from one-dimensional and two-dimensional periodic structures. Furthermore, we argue that coherent nonnormalized Mueller ellipsometry gives results with less uncertainties than standard normalized Mueller ellipsometry.