Design of a scanning polarimetric scatterometer for rough surface scattering measurements

This paper presents the mechanical design of a goniometric scatterometer to be used to measure the light scattered in rough surfaces. Advances in the instrumentation of a polarization measurement system are also presented. It has been found that the linear part of the retardance vs. voltage curves for a liquid crystal retarder corresponds to retardance between λ and λ/2 and that this range of retardance leads to variations in the frequency components of the time-varying detected signal for sinusoidal voltage. Preliminary results for a Stokes polarimeter are presented.