Session EC17 - Scattering From Particles and Surfaces.
ORAL session, Monday morning, March 22
Room 263W, GWCC
Light scattering from surfaces is a valuable industry tool for determining surface characteristics of important substrates such as silicon wafers, optical materials, and magnetic disks. The polarization can provide information about the scatterer, and can be used to distinguish between particles, roughness, and subsurface defects, when a single interface is involved. With multiple interfaces, first-order perturbation theory can predict the polarization of scattered light, yielding polarizations which depend upon the correlation between the roughnesses at the different interfaces. Measurements were carried out using an oxide layer grown on a photolithographically-generated pseudorandomly rough surface. Although details of the theory were observed in the data, the agreement was not as good as that observed for a single interface. In this talk, second-order scattering will be evaluated as a possible mechanism for the disagreement between the experimental data and the first-order scattering theory.