On Dec. 11, Ruslan Röhrich successfully defended his thesis Unconventional Metrology: Merging Nanophotonics with Computational Imaging. Ruslan is the first PhD student of the joint AMOLF-ARCNL research program. His work developed nanophotonic structures hand in hand with computational imaging techniques for improved subdiffractive optical microscopies and metrology
A new field
Ruslan’s thesis work was motivated by the stringent demands of the semiconductor industry for breakthrough optical techniques for microscopy, sensing and metrology. Plasmonic systems and meta surfaces can play an important role through resonant scattering, diffraction, and strong near fields that transduce small local variations into far field observables. However, to bring this potential to the surface, you need not only smart nanophotonic structures, but also computational techniques and algorithms to extract images or metrology metrics from light scattering. This brings together the field of computational imaging and nanophotonics. Ruslan’s thesis reports pioneering studies in collaboration with the team of Stefan Witte at ARCNL, with experts from ASML, and with Giorgo Oliveri and Bas Overvelde at AMOLF.