Patent attributes
An inspection system may include an illumination source to generate an illumination beam, illumination optics to direct the illumination beam to a sample at an off-axis angle along an illumination direction, and collection optics to collect scattered light from the sample in a dark-field mode, where the scattered light from the sample includes surface haze associated with light scattered from a surface of the sample, and where at least a at least a portion of the surface haze has elliptical polarizations. The system may further include pupil-plane optics to convert the polarizations of the surface haze across the pupil to linear polarization that is aligned parallel to a selected haze orientation direction. The system may include a linear polarizer to reject the surface haze aligned parallel to this haze orientation direction and a detector to generate a dark-field image of the sample based on light passed by the linear polarizer.
