A scanning ion gun system has been installed on the specimen preparation chamber (pressure ∼5xl0-8 torr) of the VG-HB5 STEM microscope. By using the specimen current imaging technique, it is possible to use an ion beam to sputter-clean the preferred surface region on a bulk sample. As shown in figure 1, the X-Y raster-gate control of the scanning unit for the Krato Mini-Beam I is used to minimize the beam raster area down to a 800μm x800μm square region. With beam energy of 2.5KeV, the MgO cleavage surface has been ion sputter-cleaned for less than 1 minute. The carbon film or other contaminant, introduced during the cleavage process in air, is mostly removed from the MgO crystal surfaces.The immediate SREM inspection of this as-cleaned MgO surface, within the adjacent STEM microscope, has revealed the detailed surface structures of atomic steps, which were difficult to observe on the as-cleaved MgO surfaces in the previous studies.
Independent gate control of injected and detected spin currents in CVD graphene nonlocal spin valves