Determining optical constants of 2D materials with neural networks from multi-angle reflectometry data

Synthetically generated multi-angle reflectometry data is used to train a neural network based learning system to estimate the refractive index of atomically thin layered materials in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Unlike previously developed regression based optical characterization methods, the prediction is achieved via classification by using the probabilities of each input element belonging to a label as weighting coefficients in a simple analytical formula. Various types of activation functions and gradient descent optimizers are tested to determine the optimum combination yielding the best performance. For the verification of the proposed method’s accuracy, four different materials are studied. In all cases, the maximum error is calculated to be less than 0.3%. Considering the highly dispersive nature of the studied materials, this result is a substantial improvement in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional approaches.