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Thomas A. Germer (Fed)

Dr. Germer, a researcher in the field of optics at surfaces, has been at NIST since 1992 and is currently the leader of the Surface and Interface Metrology Group. His main interests involve the measurement and interpretation of light scattering from surfaces, optical polarization measurements, optics of structured surfaces, optical imaging theory, and general spectrophotometry.

He has received the Department of Commerce Bronze Medals in 1997 and 2020 and a Silver Medal in 2010, the Judson C. French Award in 2018, the NIST Chapter of Sigma Xi Young Scientist Award in 2001, was elected Fellow of SPIE 2008 and Optica in 2023.

Dr. Germer is a member of the Sensor Science Division's Optical Properties of Materials focus program.

Research projects

Bidirectional Optical Scattering Facility
Optical Scattering Software
   SCATMECH: Polarized Light Scattering C++ Class Library
   Modeled Integrated Scatter Tool (MIST)
Biomedical Optics
Optical Grating Scatterometry
Focused beam spectroscopic ellipsometer
Nanoscale Optical Imaging
Optical Polarization Metrology

Selected Publications

Publications

Lab-based multi-wavelength EUV diffractometry for critical dimension metrology

Author(s)
Bryan Barnes, Aaron Chew, Nicholas Jenkins, Yunzhe Shao, Martin Sohn, Regis Kline, Daniel Sunday, Purnima Balakrishnan, Thomas Germer, Steven Grantham, Clay Klein, Stephanie Moffitt, Eric Shirley, Henry Kapteyn, MARGARET MURNANE
Background: The industry is developing extreme-ultraviolet wavelength (EUV) techniques to measure critical dimensions (CDs) in logic fabrication. As nascent

Ellipsometry in the EUV Regime

Author(s)
Aaron Chew, Bryan Barnes, Eric Shirley, Thomas Germer
We propose and analyze the sensitivity of an ellipsometer that uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light from the synchrotron SURF-III. The ellipsometer employs a
View more Publications

Data and Software Publications

Patents (2018-Present)

One embodiment of the invention.

Mueller Matrix Ellipsometer

NIST Inventors
Thomas A. Germer
A multi-mirror polarization state generator is combined with a multi-mirror polarization state analyzer and a detector to realize a Mueller matrix ellipsometer. It is found that grazing incidence reflection from a number of materials provides sufficient optical phase retardance to make this possible
View All Patents
Created October 9, 2019, Updated January 22, 2025
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