General Maker-fringe ellipsometric analyses in multilayer nonlinear and linear anisotropic optical media

A general new 4(n + 1) x 4(n + 1) matrix formulation of Maker fringes applicable to any anisotropic material containing n layers, convenient and straightforward for experimental data analyses, is proposed. The treatment of the transmitted and reflected harmonic waves includes the contribution of anisotropic one-photon absorption for the fundamental and harmonic waves under the assumption of no pump depletion and leads to a complete analysis of any linearly or elliptically polarized harmonic signal recorded under various incident polarization configurations. In the framework of the proposed model, we report detailed results of Maker fringes in various samples, for instance, in one and two z-cut quartz plates separated by a controlled air gap. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.