Spurious fringe processing for dielectric metasurface profile measurement using white-light scanning interferometry
Yifeng Sun, Haobiao Yu, Jianqiu Ma, Qiaowei Hu, Xu Huang, Juntao Zhou, Pengfei Xie, Zhongming Yang, Lihua Lei, Yunxia Fu, Zhishan Gao, Qun Yuan
Abstract
Dielectric metasurfaces, which are capable of manipulating incident light, have been a novel branch of flat optics. This modulation ability is realized by nanostructures with space-variant geometrical parameters such as height and diameter. Therefore, accurate profile measurement of metasurfaces is of great importance. White-light scanning interferometry is widely used for profile measurement. The step height is retrieved by locating the envelope’s peak. However, spurious fringes attached to the desired fringes were observed at the measured area near the edge of nanostructures. Their amplitude distributions vary with the density of nanostructures as well as distance to the edge. Further, anomalous coherence signals with two fringe envelopes are produced, which result in inaccurate measurement results. We attributed this phenomenon to the complex light modulation by the nanostructures. When referring to the anomalous coherence signals for the top of the nanostructures, one envelope is produced by the top, and the other is produced by the bottom; however, it is difficult to distinguish these two, which is the same case for the bottom of the nanostructures. To automatically solve these obstacles, a signal processing method, which integrates the image segmentation technology to identify and divide the anomalous coherence signals, along with a Morlet wavelet transform to extract the fringe envelope, suitable for any measured area of the dielectric metasurface, is proposed. One metasurface belt consisting of seven kinds of nanopillars with varying arrayed densities that produce different coherence signals is measured. The diameter distribution ranges from 500 to 1250 nm with a constant height of 1850 nm. The local periods in the <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>X</mml:mi> </mml:math> and <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>Y</mml:mi> </mml:math> directions are 3020 and 1740 nm, respectively. Measurement results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method for spurious fringes processing.