Light scattering from a rough metal surface: theory and experiment

There is still great interest in the determination of microtopographic properties of rough metallic surfaces from light scattering measurements. According to Beckmann-Kirchhoff theory a clear relationship is established between the in-plane angular scattered light intensity and the statistical properties of the surface. We discuss one way to invert this relationship, and we introduce a new iterative procedure to retrieve the height autocorrelation function even for a very rough metallic surface (rms surface roughness of the same order of the optical wavelength). The procedure is eventually applied to the experimental data of a known metallic surface for validation. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America