New perspectives on nano-engineering by secondary electron spectroscopy in the helium ion and scanning electron microsco
- PDF / 1,069,247 Bytes
- 15 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 180 Views
Prospective Article
New perspectives on nano-engineering by secondary electron spectroscopy in the helium ion and scanning electron microscope Nicola Stehling, and Robert Masters, University of Sheffield Faculty of Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK Yangbo Zhou, Nanchang University, School of Material Science and Engineering, Nanchang, Jiangxi, 330031, China Robert O’Connell, University of Dublin Trinity College, School of Physics, Dublin 2, Ireland Chris Holland, University of Sheffield Faculty of Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK Hongzhou Zhang, University of Dublin Trinity College, School of Physics, Dublin 2, Ireland Cornelia Rodenburg, University of Sheffield Faculty of Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Sheffield, S1 3JD, UK Address all correspondence to Cornelia Rodenburg at C.Rodenburg@sheffield.ac.uk (Received 23 January 2018; accepted 10 April 2018)
Abstract The helium ion microscope (HeIM) holds immense promise for nano-engineering and imaging with scope for in-situ chemical analysis. Here we will examine the potential of secondary electron hyperspectral imaging (SEHI) as a new route to exploring chemical variations in both two and three dimensions. We present a range of early applications in the context of image interpretation in wider materials science and process control in ion beam-based nano-engineering. Necessary steps for SEHI in the HeIM to evolve into a reliable technique which can be fully embedded into nano-engineering workflows are considered.
Introduction The helium ion microscope (HeIM) as a ground-breaking focused ion beam microscope As early as 1948 an ion microscope mass-spectrometer for the in-situ observation of chemical processes at very low magnifications was proposed[1] and the vast potential for helium (He) ions for the generation of patterns with high aspect ratio was reported in 1979.[2] In spite of demand from the characterization and patterning communities, the first commercial HeIM with a high brightness source and high-resolution imaging became available to the scientific community only in 2006. This may be surprisingly late considering that charged particle guns and lenses can be considered mature technologies with decades of application in scanning electron microscope (SEM) and focused ion beam (FIB) instruments among others. While the gas field ionization source (GFIS) and liquid metal ionization source (LMIS) were both pioneered around the mid-1970s,[3–6] the LMIS enabled the development of microscopes with ion-milling and microscale machining capabilities, which rather quickly found application within the semiconductor industry and was subsequently developed as a commercial technology. The prevalence of SEMs and FIBs utilizing LMISs meant that there was initially little benefit in developing GFIS microscopes, as they were inferior to SEMs in resolution and microanalysis tools and had no obvious advantage for micromachining due to the low sputter yield of lighter noble gas ions compared with the commonl
Data Loading...
