This paper discusses the fundamentals, applications, potential, limitations, and future perspectives of polarized light reflection techniques for the characterization of materials and related systems and devices at the nanoscale. These techniques include spectroscopic ellipsometry, polarimetry, and reflectance anisotropy. We give an overview of the various ellipsometry strategies for the measurement and analysis of nanometric films, metal nanoparticles and nanowires, semiconductor nanocrystals, and submicron periodic structures. We show that ellipsometry is capable of more than the determination of thickness and optical properties, and it can be exploited to gain information about process control, geometry factors, anisotropy, defects, and quantum confinement effects of nanostructures.

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A detailed analysis of the dielectric function (DF) for wurtzite InN as well as for In‐rich InAlN alloys is presented. The experimental data, covering the energy range from 0.72 up to 9.5 eV, were obtained by ellipsometric studies of an (11&2macr;0) a‐plane InN film and low carrier density (0001) c‐plane films. Model calculations of the imaginary part of the DF around the band gap provide direct insight how to determine the energetic position of the Fermi energy from the experimental results. Then, taking into account both, band gap renormalization and Burstein–Moss shift, the values of the gaps at zero carrier density are calculated. The dependence of the InAlN band gap on the alloy composition is described by a bowing parameter of 4.0 eV. The a‐plane film exhibits a characteristic optical anisotropy below 1 eV which is attributed to the polarization dependence of transition probabilities from the three valence bands at the Γ point of the Brillouin zone into the conduction band. The splitting of 25 meV between the absorption edges for the two polarization directions can be well explained by a crystal field energy of 19 (24) meV if a calculated spin–orbit energy of 13 (5) meV is assumed. All results emphasize a band gap value of wurtzite InN of about 0.68 eV. By fitting the third derivatives of the dielectric function up to 9.5 eV we determine the compositional dependences of the transition energies for at least three critical points of the band structure. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

The electronic and optical properties of zinc-blende (zb) Al x Ga 1−x N over the whole alloy composition range are presented in a joint theoretical and experimental study. Because zb-GaN is a direct ( v → c ) semiconductor and zb-AlN shows an indirect ( v → X c ) fundamental band gap, the ternary alloy exhibits a concentration-dependent direct-indirect band gap crossing point the position of which is highly controversial. The dielectric functions of zb-Al x Ga 1−x N alloys are measured employing synchrotron-based ellipsometry in an energy range between 1 and 20 eV. The experimentally determined fundamental energy transitions originating from the , X, and L points are identified by comparison to theoretical band-to-band transition energies. In order to determine the direct-indirect band gap crossing point, the measured transition energies at the X point have to be aligned by the calculated position of the highest valence state. Thereby density-functional theory (DFT) based approaches to the electronic structure, ranging from the standard (semi)local generalized gradient approximation (GGA), self-energy corrected local density approximation (LDA-1/2), and meta-GGA DFT (TB-mBJLDA) to hybrid functional DFT and many-body perturbation theory in the GW approximation, are applied to random and special quasirandom structure models of zb-Al x Ga 1−x N. This study provides interesting insights into the accuracy of the various numerical approaches and contains reliable ab initio data on the electronic structure and fundamental alloy band gaps of zb-Al x Ga 1−x N. Nonlocal Heyd-Scuseria-Ernzerhof-type hybrid-functional DFT calculations or, alternatively, GW quasiparticle calculations are required to reproduce prominent features of the electronic structure. The direct-indirect band gap crossing point of zb-Al x Ga 1−x N is found in the Al rich composition range at an Al content between x = 0.64 and 0.69 in hybrid functional DFT, which is in good agreement with x = 0.71 determined from the aligned experimental transition energies. Thus our study solves the long-standing debate on the nature of the fundamental zb-Al x Ga 1−x N alloy band gap.