SiO_2/Si substrate has been widely used to support two-dimensional （2-D） crystal flakes grown by chemical vapor deposition or prepared by micromechanical cleavage. The visibility of 2-D flakes is very sensitive to the thickness of the SiO_2 layer （hsiO_2）, which can not be determined precisely after the deposit of 2-D flakes. Here, we demonstrated a simple, fast and nondestructive tech- nique to precisely determine hsiO_2 of SiO_2 films on Si substrate only by optical contrast measurement with a typical micro-Raman confocal system. Because of its small lateral resolution down to the micrometer scale, this tech- nique can be used to access hsiO_2 on SiO_2/Si substrate that has been partially covered by 2-D crystal flakes, and then further determine the layer number of the 2-D crystal flakes. This technique can be extended to other dielectric multilayer substrates and the layer-number determination of 2-D crystal flakes on those substrates.
Angle-resolved polarized Raman（ARPR） spectroscopy can be utilized to assign the Raman modes based on crystal symmetry and Raman selection rules and also to characterize the crystallographic orientation of anisotropic materials.However, polarized Raman measurements can be implemented by several different configurations and thus lead to different results. In this work, we systematically analyze three typical polarization configurations： 1） to change the polarization of the incident laser, 2） to rotate the sample, and 3） to set a half-wave plate in the common optical path of incident laser and scattered Raman signal to simultaneously vary their polarization directions. We provide a general approach of polarization analysis on the Raman intensity under the three polarization configurations and demonstrate that the latter two cases are equivalent to each other. Because the basal plane of highly ordered pyrolytic graphite（HOPG） exhibits isotropic feature and its edge plane is highly anisotropic, HOPG can be treated as a modelling system to study ARPR spectroscopy of twodimensional materials on their basal and edge planes. Therefore, we verify the ARPR behaviors of HOPG on its basal and edge planes at three different polarization configurations. The orientation direction of HOPG edge plane can be accurately determined by the angle-resolved polarization-dependent G mode intensity without rotating sample, which shows potential application for orientation determination of other anisotropic and vertically standing two-dimensional materials and other materials.
