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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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We report pseudodielectric functions of SixGe1−x alloys at room temperature, measured ellipsometrically on polycrystalline samples and single-crystal epitaxial layers, in the 1.7–5.6 eV range. Accurate values of the E1 threshold energies are obtained from numerically differentiated spectra. The measured dependence of E1 on x provides an efficient way to determine the alloy composition x. The spectral and compositional dependence of the optical constants forms a data base for optical studies of Si/SiGe layered structures.