Can any one help me in understanding the Jones and Muller measurements and Jones and Muller matrix in Spectroscopic Ellipsometry. How do these matrix help in determining the optical properties of the material?
Thank you so much ...................... I have got one more question please.............. While taking the ellipsometry data if i treat birefringent material as non-birefringent would it affect my optical properties and secondly can you please explain birefringent materials and how do they differ from materials that are anisotropic.
i didnt get ur point " Anistropic materials are only birefringent if they interact with s and p light waves." Are all materials able to interact with s and p polarized waves?
I think that some concepts are mixed up here: You get elliptic polarizations both from optically isotropic and anisotropic crystals, and you can measure these elliptic polarizations by ellipsometry. All crystals are ordered, but not all crystals are optically anisotropic. Cubic crystals are optically isotropic and all the rest are anisotropic, or birefringent if you want. You speak about birefringence in the transparency range of the material (Typically by looking through a birefringent material you get a double image) but you can also use the denomination when the material absorbs, referred to the anisotropy of the refractive index.
You asked about the difference between anisotropic and birefringent: Well, all anisotropic crystals can be birefringent but there are certain specific propagation directions of the light (called optic axes) in which anisotropic materials are not birefringent. So you can have anisotropy but look along a direction without birefringence. Some anisotropic materials (tetragonal, hexagonal and trigonal) are uniaxial (there is one such direction or one optic axis) and the rest (orthorhombic, monoclinic, and triclinic) are biaxial (have two such axes).
You can almost always work with Jones matrices, you don't need Mueller matrices to deal with anisotropy or birefringence. Mueller matrices are useful when your light gets depolarized, the chosen description depends on what you need to do.
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