Simulation of the depolarization effect in porous silicon

Abstract

We describe a radiative transfer (RT) equation for the simulation of optical scattering effects in a nanostructured semiconductor for spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE). As an example, we chose porous silicon (PS), whose pores are considered to act as light scatterers. We examined the effects of pore radius, slab thickness, and incident angle. The volume scattering effect in the internal morphology of the PS generates incoherent light, leading to depolarization. By simulating the four Stokes parameters through the RT equation, we could theoretically assess the degree of polarization that is essential for SE measurements of some nanostructured semiconductors. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.