Estimation of optical parameters of very thin films

In recent papers, the problem of estimating the thickness and the optical constants (refractive index and absorption coefficient) of thin films using only transmittance data has been addressed by means of optimization techniques. Models were proposed for solving this problem using linearly constrained optimization and unconstrained optimization. However, the optical parameters of “very thin” films could not be recovered with methods that are successful in other situations. Here we introduce an optimization technique that seems to be efficient for recovering the parameters of very thin films.