Analysis of totally reflected light from liquid crystal cell using renormalized ellipsometry

Standard ellipsometry is usually applied for the evaluation of an optical isotropic system, but it is insufficient to analyze light reflected from an anisotropic system such as a liquid crystal (LC) cell. In order to analyze the light reflected from the LC cell, the standard ellipsometry system combined with the photo elastic modulator was extended to renormalized ellipsometry by introducing the definition of the renormalized reflection coefficients without any modification of the conventional experimental procedure. The experimental results such as the ellipsometric angles versus the rotation angle of the LC cell and the dependence of the ellipsometric angles on the applied electric field were in good agreement with the theoretical results based on renormalized ellipsometry. From these results, it was confirmed that renormalized ellipsometry was quite a useful technique to analyze the totally reflected light from the LC cell.