Nanometrology optical ruler imaging system using diffraction from a quasiperiodic structure

This work demonstrates wafer-scale, path-independent, atomically-based long term-stable, position nanometrology. This nanometrology optical ruler imaging system uses the diffraction pattern of an atomically stabilized laser from a microfabricated quasiperiodic aperture array as a two-dimensional optical ruler. Nanometrology is accomplished by cross correlations of image samples of this optical ruler. The quasiperiodic structure generates spatially dense, sharp optical features. This work demonstrates new results showing positioning errors down to 17.2 nm over wafer scales and long term stability below 20 nm over six hours. This work also numerically demonstrates robustness of the optical ruler to variations in the microfabricated aperture array and discretization noise in imagers.