Application of white light Fresnel diffractometry to film thickness measurement.

In this work we present the theoretical background and experimental procedure to measure the thickness of thin films by analyzing Fresnel diffraction patterns obtained from polychromatic illumination of phase-step samples. As examples of this technique, we measured the thicknesses of thin aluminum layers on glass substrates using three different broad-spectrum light sources. The results are in excellent agreement with independent interferometric measurements within less than 5% relative uncertainties.