Modular Magnetic Lens Accessory to Basic Field Emission SEM

Author(s):  
Duane C. Holmes ◽  
James H. Cooper ◽  
James J. Gold ◽  
L. M. Welter

It is well known that field emission produces a significantly brighter probe than conventional heated-filament methods. Heretofore, however, the only commercially available field emission SEM exploited this brightness advantage to permit TV rate scanning at all magnifications; the viewing of large, bright, “flicker free” and “stripe-free” images; and lownoise photography at short exposure times. A resolution of 250 Å, in secondary mode, was obtained using an electrostatic lens design. The high brightness may also be exploited to yield very high resolution and/or high signal to noise images.

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (22) ◽  
pp. 3784-3793 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. H. BOULWARE ◽  
J. D. JARVIS ◽  
H. L. ANDREWS ◽  
C. A. BRAU

At the tips of sharp needles, the surface electric field is enhanced by many orders of magnitude. This intensifies thermionic emission and photoemission of electrons through the Schottky effect, and reduces the effect of space charge. The increased current density improves the brightness of electron sources by orders of magnitude. In addition, at very high fields (>109 V/m ), field emission and photo-field emission produce very high current density. Arrays of needles can be used to achieve high total current.


Author(s):  
J. Endo ◽  
T. Kawasaki ◽  
T. Masuda ◽  
A. Tonomura

A field-emission electron gun is one of the most epoch-making technologies in an electron microscopic world. In a transmission electron microscope, a high brightness of this beam has been effectively employed for electron-holographic measurements, though the value is not still high enough. Development of a higher brightness beam will promise to open up unattained application possibilities of electron holography such as high resolution and high sensitivity interferometry.We developed the field emission electron microscope for electron holographic applications. Special attentions were paid for high brightness, large beam current and easy operation. Figure 1 is a schematic diagram of the electron gun. In order not to deteriorate the original high-brightness feature of the beam by the aberrations in the gun and the condenser lenses, a magnetic lens was installed between the tip and the extraction anode so that the total aberration effect might be minimized. Field emitted electron beam is converged by the magnetic and the electrostatic lenses, and accelerated in a ten-stage accelerator which is made of porcelain.


Author(s):  
W.R. Bottoms ◽  
G.B. Haydon

There is great interest in improving the brightness of electron sources and therefore the ability of electron optical instrumentation to probe the properties of materials. Extensive work by Dr. Crew and others has provided extremely high brightness sources for certain kinds of analytical problems but which pose serious difficulties in other problems. These sources cannot survive in conventional system vacuums. If one wishes to gather information from the other signal channels activated by electron beam bombardment it is necessary to provide sufficient current to allow an acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. It is possible through careful design to provide a high brightness field emission source which has the capability of providing high currents as well as high current densities to a specimen. In this paper we describe an electrode to provide long-lived stable current in field emission sources.The source geometry was based upon the results of extensive computer modeling. The design attempted to maximize the total current available at a specimen.


Author(s):  
T. Miyokawa ◽  
S. Norioka ◽  
S. Goto

Field emission SEMs (FE-SEMs) are becoming popular due to their high resolution needs. In the field of semiconductor product, it is demanded to use the low accelerating voltage FE-SEM to avoid the electron irradiation damage and the electron charging up on samples. However the accelerating voltage of usual SEM with FE-gun is limited until 1 kV, which is not enough small for the present demands, because the virtual source goes far from the tip in lower accelerating voltages. This virtual source position depends on the shape of the electrostatic lens. So, we investigated several types of electrostatic lenses to be applicable to the lower accelerating voltage. In the result, it is found a field emission gun with a conical anode is effectively applied for a wide range of low accelerating voltages.A field emission gun usually consists of a field emission tip (cold cathode) and the Butler type electrostatic lens.


Author(s):  
A. V. Crewe ◽  
J. Wall ◽  
L. M. Welter

A scanning microscope using a field emission source has been described elsewhere. This microscope has now been improved by replacing the single magnetic lens with a high quality lens of the type described by Ruska. This lens has a focal length of 1 mm and a spherical aberration coefficient of 0.5 mm. The final spot size, and therefore the microscope resolution, is limited by the aberration of this lens to about 6 Å.The lens has been constructed very carefully, maintaining a tolerance of + 1 μ on all critical surfaces. The gun is prealigned on the lens to form a compact unit. The only mechanical adjustments are those which control the specimen and the tip positions. The microscope can be used in two modes. With the lens off and the gun focused on the specimen, the resolution is 250 Å over an undistorted field of view of 2 mm. With the lens on,the resolution is 20 Å or better over a field of view of 40 microns. The magnification can be accurately varied by attenuating the raster current.


Author(s):  
N. Tamura ◽  
T. Goto ◽  
Y. Harada

On account of its high brightness, the field emission electron source has the advantage that it provides the conventional electron microscope with highly coherent illuminating system and that it directly improves the, resolving power of the scanning electron microscope. The present authors have reported some results obtained with a 100 kV field emission electron microscope.It has been proven, furthermore, that the tungsten emitter as a temperature field emission source can be utilized with a sufficient stability under a modest vacuum of 10-8 ~ 10-9 Torr. The present paper is concerned with an extension of our study on the characteristics of the temperature field emitters.


Author(s):  
M. Iwatsuki ◽  
Y. Kokubo ◽  
Y. Harada

On accout of its high brightness, small optical source size, and minimal energy spread, the field emission gun (FEG) has the advantage that it provides the conventional transmission electron microscope (TEM) with a highly coherent illumination system and directly improves the resolving power and signal-to-noise ratio of the scanning electron microscope (SEM). The FEG is generally classified into two types; the cold field emission (C-FEG) and thermal field emission gun (T-FEG). The former, in which a field emitter is used at the room temperature, was successfully developed as an electron source for the SEM. The latter, in which the emitter is heated to the temperature range of 1000-1800°K, was also proved to be very suited as an electron source for the TEM, as well as for the SEM. Some characteristics of the two types of the FEG have been studied and reported by many authors. However, the results of the respective types have been obtained separately under different experimental conditions.


Author(s):  
Judith M. Brock ◽  
Max T. Otten ◽  
Marc. J.C. de Jong

A Field Emission Gun (FEG) on a TEM/STEM instrument provides a major improvement in performance relative to one equipped with a LaB6 emitter. The improvement is particularly notable for small-probe techniques: EDX and EELS microanalysis, convergent beam diffraction and scanning. The high brightness of the FEG (108 to 109 A/cm2srad), compared with that of LaB6 (∼106), makes it possible to achieve high probe currents (∼1 nA) in probes of about 1 nm, whilst the currents for similar probes with LaB6 are about 100 to 500x lower. Accordingly the small, high-intensity FEG probes make it possible, e.g., to analyse precipitates and monolayer amounts of segregation on grain boundaries in metals or ceramics (Fig. 1); obtain high-quality convergent beam patterns from heavily dislocated materials; reliably detect 1 nm immuno-gold labels in biological specimens; and perform EDX mapping at nm-scale resolution even in difficult specimens like biological tissue.The high brightness and small energy spread of the FEG also bring an advantage in high-resolution imaging by significantly improving both spatial and temporal coherence.


Author(s):  
Akira Tonomura

Electron holography is a two-step imaging method. However, the ultimate performance of holographic imaging is mainly determined by the brightness of the electron beam used in the hologram-formation process. In our 350kV holography electron microscope (see Fig. 1), the decrease in the inherently high brightness of field-emitted electrons is minimized by superposing a magnetic lens in the gun, for a resulting value of 2 × 109 A/cm2 sr. This high brightness has lead to the following distinguished features. The minimum spacing (d) of carrier fringes is d = 0.09 Å, thus allowing a reconstructed image with a resolution, at least in principle, as high as 3d=0.3 Å. The precision in phase measurement can be as high as 2π/100, since the position of fringes can be known precisely from a high-contrast hologram formed under highly collimated illumination. Dynamic observation becomes possible because the current density is high.


Author(s):  
L. F. Allard ◽  
E. Völkl ◽  
T. A. Nolan

The illumination system of the cold field emission (CFE) Hitachi HF-2000 TEM operates with a single condenser lens in normal imaging mode, and with a second condenser lens excited to give the ultra-fine 1 nm probe for microanalysis. The electron gun provides a guaranteed high brightness of better than 7×l08 A/cm2/sr, more than twice the guaranteed brightness of Schottky emission guns. There have been several articles in the recent literature (e.g. refs.) which claim that the geometry of this illumination system yields a total current which is so low that when the beam is spread at low magnifications (say 10 kX), the operator must “keep his eyes glued to the binoculars” in order to see the image. It is also claimed that this illuminating system produces an isoplanatic patch (the area over which image character does not vary significantly) at high magnification which is so small that the instrument is ineffective for recording high resolution images.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document