Three-dimensional polarization aberration in hyper-numerical aperture lithography optics

Polarization aberration is usually represented by Jones pupil with two-dimensional (2D) format in local coordinate system. People transform the 2D polarization aberration into global coordinate system for three-dimensional (3D) imaging simulation by using mathematical coordinate transformation, rather than 3D polarization aberration defined by physics, which results in a lack of precision of 3D imaging simulation. In this paper, a new representation of 3D polarization aberration is introduced. Then the 3D polarization aberration of a hyper-NA lithography optics is extracted that is available to precisely describe the polarization properties of the optics and evaluate the 3D vector imaging performance without additional mathematical coordinate transformation. 3D polarization aberration of this paper avoids the errors of transforming 2D polarization aberration into global coordinate system mathematically.