A technique for extracting and analyzing the polarization aberration of hyper-numerical aperture image optics

Abstract

For hyper-numerical aperture (NA) lithographic optics, one of the design goals is to minimize polarization aberration (PA). However PA represented by Jones pupil can not be acquired by design software CODE V™ directly. And most researchers generate PA by computer randomly in study of various presentation of PA. Optical designers and instrument developers should analyze the realistic PA in optical design procedure, which is most important for controlling the PA before the optics is fabricated. This work presents a technique for extracting and analyzing the realistic PA caused by large incident angle of light, film coatings and intrinsic birefringence of lens materials in hyper-NA optics. The PA and its decomposition is obtained and analyzed for optics with different coatings using the technology in this paper. The results show that the subset aberrations of PAs can compensate each other via different coatings on the PO. The results also reveal that coating design should balance the transmission and its aberration (apodization).