Combined Focused Ion Beam-Ultramicrotomy Method for TEM Specimen Preparation of Porous Fine-Grained Materials

Improved focused ion beam target preparation of (S)TEM specimen--a method for obtaining ultrathin lamellae.

Specimen quality is vital to (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (TEM) investigations. In particular, thin specimens are required to obtain excellent high-resolution TEM images. Conventional focused ion beam (FIB) preparation methods cannot be employed to reliably create high quality specimens much thinner than 20 nm. We have developed a method for in situ target preparation of ultrathi...

A Focused Ion Beam Specimen Preparation Method to Minimize Gallium Ion Concentration in Copper Atom-Probe Tomography Specimen Tips

Atom-probe tomography (APT) is a quantitative technique that permits three-dimensional (3-D) spectroscopic characterization of interfaces and other nanometer-scale features within a material. Specimens for atom-probe tomography (APT) analysis of semiconductor devices and nanostructured materials are typically fabricated employing a focused ion beam (FIB) instrument [1 3] or a dual-beam FIB inst...

Focused high- and low-energy ion milling for TEM specimen preparation

TEM specimen preparation techniques

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a powerful tool for the investigation of the microstructure of materials, providing crystallographic information and composition at the nanometer scale. For such studies, samples should be transparent to the electron beam. In this review, TEM sample preparation techniques for different classes of materials, such as metals and alloys, multilayered coatin...

Preparation of TEM samples of metal-oxide interface by the focused ion beam technique.

This paper describes a procedure to prepare metal-oxide interfaces for transmission electron microscopy by the focused ion beam technique. The advantage of this procedure is to allow the observation of metal-oxide interfaces of irradiated samples with a homogeneous thickness without the need to have an instrument inside laboratories that are specialized for the manipulation of irradiated materi...