Service Overview:

  • Ellipsometry is a non-contact and atomically-accurate optical technique for thin-film and material characterization.
  • It is extensively used in industry and various scientific fields (both material & life sciences) for measuring the properties and thickness of thin films.
  • However, ellipsometers have low lateral resolution and cannot easily measure areas laterally smaller than ~50 micrometers (µm), inhibiting their effective use for micro-structures which are abundant in today’s technology and research.
  • Our ellipsometer at the Hebrew University Nano Center has a millimeter-scale spot size, making it unfit for investigation of micro-structures.
  • The high spatial resolution ellipsometer consists of a light source unit providing collimated illumination, a polarization modulation unit, a high numerical aperture objective lens, and a light collection unit with a polarization analyzer and detector array. The control unit processes the output image data using stored calibration data to assign incident angles to the corresponding data points.
  • The APC technique involves measuring at least two reference samples with known optical properties and simultaneously determining the system’s polarization parameters and incident angles by minimizing the error between the calculated and reference values.

Key Features:

The Spectroscopic Micro-Ellipsometer, or shortly SME, is a microscope-integrated ellipsometer with a high lateral resolution and a record-breaking data acquisition rate, featuring:

  • Patented system & method
  • Proven performance
  • Atomic-level sensitivity
  • Award-winning technology

Applications:

  • Mapping the homogeneity, thickness, and optical properties of thin films with high lateral resolution:
  • Refractive index (n)
  • Extinction coefficient (k)
  • Film thickness (d)
  • Micron-scale patterned structures
  • Photonic devices
  • MEMS
  • Non-uniform small samples
  • Metamaterials & nanostructures
  • Thickness and layer number
  • Identification of 2D materials
  • Biological structures & films

Expertise and Resources:

The SME is developed at the lab of Prof. Ronen Rapaport from the Racah Institute of Physics and is located at his lab in Edmond J. Safra campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Contact us for possible collaborations!

Ralfy Kenaz – [email protected] – Link to LinkedIn profile

Prof. Ronen Rapaport – [email protected] – Link to website

Prof. Hadar Steinberg (Director of the HUJI Nano Center) – [email protected]  – Link to website