title: Super-aperture metrology: overcoming a fundamental limit in imaging smooth highly curved surfaces.
abstract: The imaging of smooth, highly curved or tilted surfaces is widely recognized as one of the most challenging and unsolved problems in optical imaging and metrology today. The reason is that even when such surfaces are imaged using high aperture microscope objectives the steepness of the features causes the light to be reflected in such a way that it is not captured by the lens. This is true even in the limiting case of unity numerical aperture since the illuminating light may also be reflected in the forward direction. In order to overcome this fundamental problem we have developed a method whereby such specimens are covered with a readily removable organic fluorescent film thereby creating an isotropic scattering surface. We show that we are readily able to detect slopes with angles close 90° using a 0.75 NA objective--an 82% improvement over the theoretical aperture limit. Issues of variation in film thickness deposition are shown to be readily accommodated. This approach may be used with other fluorophore materials, organic or inorganic, since there is no need for biocompatibility in this application.
authors.affiliation: Center of Ultra-Precision Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 92, West Da-Zhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Center of Ultra-Precision Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 92, West Da-Zhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Center of Ultra-Precision Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 92, West Da-Zhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Tan
authors.affiliation: School of Science, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 92, West Da-Zhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China.
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Center of Ultra-Precision Optoelectronic Instrument Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, No. 92, West Da-Zhi Street, Harbin, 150001, China.|Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PJ, U.K.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wilson
keywords: Chemical vapour deposition; highly curved smooth surface; rhodamine B; scattering; super aperture optical metrology; thickness error correction