Near-field ellipsometry for thin film characterization.

A near-field ellipsometry method is presented for nano-scale thin film characterization. The technique fuses the topographic and ellipso-metric optical measurements that are simultaneously obtained by a scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM). It is shown that the proposed near-field ellipsometry is able to attain nano-scale lateral resolution and correct artifacts in characterization. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation and experimental studies.