DAMAGE DEPTH PROFILES DETERMINATION BY ELLIPSOMETRY - A NEW NUMERICALALGORITHM

A new iterative algorithm for extracting the depth profiles of damaged or inhomogeneous surface layers from variable angle of incidence spec troscopic ellipsometry data is developed. It is demonstrated that an u nknown profile could be reconstructed very accurately using an effecti ve medium approximation without making any particular assumptions abou t the damage level depth function. The algorithm is based on some idea s of the inverse scattering theory and it is an implementation of the Newton-Kantorovitch method for solving of nonlinear operator equations .