Photoelastic modulated ellipsometry on magnetooptic multilayer films

A method is described to obtain the permittivity tensor of a magnetooptic layer in a multilayer film by phase modulated ellipsometry. It is shown that the phase difference caused by oblique incidence reflection can be separated from the phase difference caused by the magnetooptic effect by selecting the angle of the analyzer, i.e., a Wollaston prism and a dual detector. A numeric method is described to extract the optical constants from the measured quantities. © 1986 Optical Society of America.