Correction of the phase retardation caused by intrinsic birefringence in deep UV lithography

In the year 2001 it was reported that the birefringence induced by spatial dispersion (BISD), sometimes also called intrinsic birefringence, had been measured and calculated for fluorides CaF2 and BaF2 in the deep UV range. It was also shown that the magnitude of the BISD in these cubic crystals is sufficiently large to cause serious problems...

Saddle points in the merit function landscape of systems of thin lenses in contact

The merit function landscape of systems of thin lenses in contact, which are perhaps the simplest possible types of optical systems, shows remarkable regularities. It is easier to understand how the optimization parameter space of these simple systems is divided into basins of attraction for the various local minima if one focuses on the (Morse...

Topography of the merit function landscape in optical system design

We have shown recently that, when certain quite general conditions are satisfied, the set of local minima in the optical merit function space forms a network where they are all connected through optimization paths generated from saddle points having a Morse index of 1. A new global optimization method, that makes use of this linking network to...

The effect of intrinsic birefringence in deep UV-lithography

The subject of birefringence induced by spatial dispersion (BISD), also called intrinsic birefringence, recently became an important issue for 157-nm lithography. For the deep UV range, because of intrinsic absorption, only crystalline materials can be used as optical materials for lens manufacturing. The physical properties of crystals are...