Goniometric optical scatter instrument for out-of-plane ellipsometry measurements

A goniometric optical scatter instrument has been developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology which can readily perform measurements of optical scatter and its associated polarization in directions out of the plane of incidence. In this article the coordinate transformations that are required to operate such a goniometer with respect to sample-specific coordinates are described. We present new methods for measuring the 3×3 nonhanded Mueller matrix elements using dual rotating half-wave retarders, and present a subset of the Mueller matrix, referred to as the bidirectional ellipsometric parameters which have been shown to simplify the interpretation of the data. The results of out-of-plane Mueller matrix and bidirectional ellipsometric measurements from a titanium nitride layer on silicon are presented.