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Spectrum interpretation by simulation

 

written by W.Theiss

 

 

 

W. Theiss – Hard- and Software for Optical Spectroscopy

Dr.-Bernhard-Klein-Str. 110, D-52078 Aachen, Germany

Phone: + 49 241 5661390     Fax:     + 49 241 9529100

e-mail: theiss@mtheiss.com     web: www.mtheiss.com

 

January 2012

 

The goal of optical spectroscopy is - in most cases - the determination of microscopic quantities such as resonance frequencies of oscillating atoms, impurity concentrations or thin film thicknesses from macroscopic experiments. This is possible if the microscopic phenomena are coupled to the electric fields of the probing radiation. The key property of a material representing this connection is the dielectric function or its square root, the complex refractive index - both quantities are more generally called 'optical constants'.

In the case of layered systems a very powerful technique to interpret optical spectra is given by a simulation of the experiment (based on a physical model) and adjustment of the model parameters to fit the measured data. Fortunately, rather simple models of optical constants lead to realistic simulations of optical spectra. This enables fast parameter fits from which the wanted information can be obtained.

The interpretation of optical spectra is the central task of SCOUT - this manual gives technical information about the program features. Discussions of successful SCOUT applications are found on our homepage www.mtheiss.com and in the tutorials accompanying this document.

 

The next section gives an overview on this manual - from there you can jump to the individual parts of this documentation.

 

This text was written using the program Help&Manual (from EC Software, http://www.helpandmanual.com). With this software we produce the printed manual as well as the online help and HTML code for the internet verion of the document - with exactly the same text input! This is a very productive feature and makes the development of the documentation quite easy. However, for this reason the printed manual may sometimes contain some 'strange' text fragments which seem to have no relation to the rest of the text. These might be hypertext jumps in the online help system which - of course - lose there function in the printed version of the manual.

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