Generating a cylindrical vector beam interferometrically for ellipsometric measurement

• Generating a cylindrical vector beam interferometrically was presented in this work.
• The generation of the cylindrical vector beam were with high stability and quality.
• Ellipsometric parameters can be obtained with one shot of camera capturing.
• Measurements of three different film thicknesses zones were demonstrated.

Cylindrical vector beams have been widely used in material processing, lithography, optical trapping and manipulating. However, few works discussed their application in polarization metrology. A cylindrical vector beam generated by a concrete interferometer setup is employed to determine the ellipsometric parameters of thin films, which was discussed in this work. A TEM01 mode beam was applied as the light source impinging into a modified Michelson interferometer with contiguous optical elements. The mode of light beam was transformed and the polarization states were coordinated with the optical configuration that made the output beam a doughnut-shaped axially symmetric polarized beam. In addition, the output beam plays the same role as rotating polarization element configuration of an ellipsometer. However, the polarization modulation was in spatial domain instead of temporal domain. By making use of this configuration, ellipsometric parameters of thin films were deduced and the results were very close to theoretical values.