Direct determination of effective interfacial optical constants by nonlinear optical null ellipsometry of chiral films

Abstract

Nonlinear optical null ellipsometry (NONE) measurements of chiral interfaces allowed direct experimental measurement of the linear interfacial optical constants in surface second harmonic generation (SHG) measurements. Since phase information is retained in NONE measurements, the real and imaginary components of the interfacial refractive index (n and k, respectively) were uniquely obtained from the measured chiral chi((2)) tensor elements of a fluorescein-labeled bovine serum albumin film. The sensitivity of the calculated chi((2)) tensor elements on the assumed values of the interfacial optical constants allowed measurements of n and k to four significant figures with no additional adjustable parameters and independent of molecular symmetry. The optical constants measured by SHG agreed within a relative error of 0.8% with values predicted independently using a simple effective medium approximation, also with no adjustable parameters. Additionally, those same optical constants produced relationships between the achiral chi((2)) tensor elements in excellent agreement with predictions for systems exhibiting weak orientational order. This study suggests that the far-field intensity and polarization state of the nonlinear optical beam may be largely independent of the near-field optical constants within the interfacial layer in the limit of a film thickness much less than the wavelength of light.