SINGLE PHOTON BEAM AS A TOOL FOR MEASURING MICRO- AND NANOOBJECTS

Ryszard Jablonski

Abstract

Until now, nobody succeeded in forming algorithm describing photon beam incident on the surface at 90 deg (sliding light). Due to the importance of this problem, we decided to solve it experimentally. The experiments started with measurement of extremely long microbores with focused laser microbeam. In the second stage of experiments we designed a simple model of Photon Batching Device (PBD) generating photon beam within the range from a few tens of photons up to several millions photons per second. At this level the corpuscular character of light dominates over its wave character. In the experiments an adjustable microbore was used (3mm long and 100 µm in diameter). The outgoing energy, for particular microbore, was determined by scanning linearly and angularly the bore with photon beam and integrating the results. <BR />The application of PBD has been extended to the measurement of microgaps formed of silicon samples of different slot thickness (100 - 500 µm) and width (0 - 3 µm). Finally, a new experimental setup was designed according to the schematic of Mach-Zender interferometer. One of the mirrors is fixed to piezoceramics and oscillating at the frequency 20 kHz. The intensity of signal beam <i>I</i>_s and heterodyne beam <i>I</i>_h were regulated independently over wide limits by attenuators. <BR />In experiments, it was studied the influence of the aperture size on the beating signal with the equal power of <i>I</i>_h and <i>I</i>_s signals (the calibrated diaphragms had diameters 500, 50, 10 and 5 µm). Photons penetrate the opening 5 µm, it means that their transverse size is less than 5 mm.

Keywords

measurement, microelements, photon size, heterodyning, single photon

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IMEKO-TC14-2013-PL-01.pdf

DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC14 - Measurement of Geometrical Quantities

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