Hill-climbing techniques as a method of calculating the optical constants and thickness of a thin metallic film

A modified form of the Nelder and Mead simplex hill-climbing technique has been applied to the calculation of n, k and d for thin metallic films from measurements of R p , R s , T p and T s . In order to obtain consistent results it was found necessary, in addition, to include an error term in the objective function so that the known approximate value of d could be used in the calculations.