Quantitative analysis of wide field-of-view and broadband quarter-wave plate based on metasurface

As the numerical aperture (NA) of the projection objective increases continually and the exposure pattern feature size decreases gradually, the polarization illumination is introduced into the lithography system. Therefore, it is necessary to design a wide field-of-view (FOV) wave plate to eliminate the effect of oblique incident light on the phase delay of the traditional zero order wave plate effectively. The quarter-wave plate with 20° FOV based on birefringent optical crystals has been designed in our laboratory by Dong et al. In order to obtain a wider FOV, we explore a previously reported Ag patch ultrathin quarter-wave plate whose performances were not analyzed by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In this paper, we mainly investigate three performances of the Ag patch quarter-wave plate consisting of FOV, achromatic band and achromatic band transmission. The simulation results indicate that when phase difference error is controlled at ±2° (1) the range of FOV of the quarter-wave plate is ±29° at 632nm; (2) the achromatic band ranges from 618nm to 658nm at normal incidence; (3) the achromatic band transmission ranges from 11% to 30%. Compared with the traditional wave plate made of birefringent crystals, the achromatic band and transmission is slightly lower but the FOV of this quarter-wave plate is much wider. Thus, this Ag patch nanoscale wide FOV quarter-wave plate can be effectively used in high NA lithography projection exposure systems to reduce the polarization aberration caused by oblique incidence of light.