Journal of Electron Microscopy 

About: Journal of Electron Microscopy is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Scanning transmission electron microscopy & Electron microscope. It has an ISSN identifier of 0022-0744. Over the lifetime, 3494 publications have been published receiving 37667 citations.

Progress in aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy.

Abstract: A new corrector of spherical aberration (C(S)) for a dedicated scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is described and its results are presented. The corrector uses strong octupoles and increases C(C) by only 0.2 mm relative to the uncorrected microscope. Its overall stability is greatly improved compared to our previous design. It has achieved a point-to-point resolution of 1.23 A in high-angle annular dark field images at 100 kV. It has also increased the current available in a 1.3 A-sized probe by about a factor of ten compared to existing STEMs. Its operation is greatly assisted by newly developed autotuning software which measures all the aberration coefficients up to fifth order in less than one minute. We conclude by discussing the present limits of aberration-corrected STEM, and likely future developments.

Reducing focused ion beam damage to transmission electron microscopy samples

Abstract: One of the most important applications of focused ion beam (FIB) systems is sample preparation for transmission electron microscopy (TEM). However, the use of the FIB inherently involves changing and damaging the sample, and thereby degrades the TEM resolution. This paper addresses the beam-induced damage and artifacts, particularly in applications involving silicon semiconductors. The damage appears in the form of amorphization on the surface of the TEM foil. The characteristics of this amorphous damage were studied by making TEM observations of cross sections of the affected foil. The damage is typically 20 to 30 nm thick for a 30 keV FIB, which is generally overly thick for modern silicon devices with feature sizes less than 250 nm. This paper reviews the reported damage depths of FIB-prepared samples, which are determined by experiments and calculations. Several damage reduction techniques, such as the use of gas-assisted etching, low energy FIB, cleaning the FIB-fabricated cross section by wet or dry etching and cleaning by broad ion beam (BIB) milling have also been reviewed, with emphasis on applicability to silicon devices. We conclude that the use of low energy FIB and cleaning by argon BIB are particularly efficient techniques.