Profile measurement taken with liquid-crystal gratings and a phase-shifting technique is proposed, and its effectiveness is verified by experiment. The surface profile is obtained by measurement of the phase distributions of the sinusoidal gratings deformed by an object's surface. The liquid-crystal grating gives an accurate phase shift, an arbitrary projection pitch, and a constant surface brightness compared with conventional gratings such as a laser interference fringe grating and a Ronchi grating. Therefore a flexible measuring system may be developed with it. Two gratings with different pitches are used to measure an object with large steps. A two-color projection system can be used to produce such gratings simultaneously. Locally varying reflectivity on a surface can also be compensated by adjustment of the color component of the projected grating with a liquid-crystal grating. Thus the contrast in the projected grating can be made uniform, and a good profile measurement can be accomplished.

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High sensitivity actinic detection of native defects on extreme ultraviolet lithography mask blanksA new actinic mask inspection system has been developed, and simulations were carried out on its imaging performance. Preliminary experiments using the extreme ultraviolet ͑EUV͒ microscope developed at NTT have shown that it can resolve 250-and 350-nm-wide lines ͑on a mask͒. Furthermore, the type of absorber material used in a mask was found to have some effect on the contrast of mask images taken by EUVM. Our results demonstrate that an at-wavelength microscope is a powerful and useful tool for evaluating mask fabrication processes for EUVL.

D b r i e m e n t d'ktrophysique Relativiste et d e Cosmologie O b m t o i r e , 92190 Meudon, France AbsImacL Slatting from the equations of motion obeyed by fields, as they result from general approximations [they are m!ia to be of the following form [k2n(k)]+ = 0, for quasi bosons, and a similar equation for quasifermions] a lagmgian formalism is derived and, accordingly, consewed quantities are obtained. Next these fields are quantized and general expressions for the main observables are derived. Statistical mechanics of quasiparlicles then follow via the use of covariant Wigner functions.