Institute of Information Theories and Applications FOI ITHEA
Abstract
The evaluation from experimental data, of physical quantities, which enter into the electromagnetic
Maxwell equations, is described as inverse optical problem. The functional relations between the dependent and
independent variables are of transcendental character and numeric procedures for evaluation of the unknowns
are largely used. Herein, we discuss a direct approach to the solution, illustrated by a specific example of
determination of thin films optical constants from spectrophotometric data. New algorithm is proposed for the
parameters evaluation, which does not need an initial guess of the unknowns and does not use iterative
procedures. Thus we overcome the intrinsic deficiency of minimization techniques, such as gradient search
methods, Simplex methods, etc. The price of it is a need of more computing power, but our algorithm is easily
implemented in structures such as grid clusters. We show the advantages of this approach and its potential for
generalization to other inverse optical problems