| The capabilities of fabricating, measuring and manipulating nano-structures optically are of increasing importance to many areas. This thesis describes several optical polarization measurement and manipulation techniques for a variety of nanometer scale applications, especially, high-resolution optical metrology.; A high-resolution imaging ellipsometer is developed to explore the feasibility of characterizing subwavelength structures with polarization signatures. Resolved surface pattern is measured for calibration purposes. Measurement of linewidth beyond the diffraction limit is performed with this imaging microellipsometer and the results are in good agreement with focused-beam rigorous-coupled-wave simulations. An automated scanning microellipsometer using a radial symmetry concept is implemented. Experiments are carried out to verify the design and its imaging capability is demonstrated through automated scan. Owing to its radial symmetry, this microellipsometer offers high spatial resolution and a better signal-to-noise ratio than other microellipsometer techniques. Optical tunneling through ultrathin dielectric films mimics the absorption in metallic films, enabling the accurate measurement of ultrathin dielectric film refractive index. A solid immersion tunneling ellipsometer technique is developed for the accurate characterization of ultrathin dielectric films. Combining this tunneling ellipsometer with the solid immersion lens technique, a solid immersion nano-ellipsometer has been built to characterize thin films with deep sub-micron transversal resolution.; Methods developed for the radially symmetric microellipsometer can also be applied to generate and manipulate specially polarized beams—cylindrical vector beams. The applications of these beams to high-resolution imaging, lithography, versatile optical tweezers and flattop focusing are also discussed. |
