Several ion source alternatives for current focused beam (FIB) systems have been studied to achieve higher brightness, including cold atom sources. However, a study of ultracold ions interacting with often used materials is seldom reported. Here, we investigate milling on several typical samples in prototype Rb FIB system at 8.5 keV energy. For polycrystalline metallic substrates, such as Cu an...

A method for the fabrication of bow-tie optical antennas at the apex of pyramidal Si3N4 atomic force microscopy tips is described. We demonstrate that these novel optical probes are capable of sub-wavelength imaging of single quantum dots at room temperature. The enhanced and confined optical near-field at the antenna feed gap leads to locally enhanced photoluminescence (PL) of single quantum d...

While FIB sample preparation for transmission electron microscopy is a well established technique, few examples exist of samples of sufficient quality for atomic resolution imaging by aberration corrected (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (STEM). In this work we demonstrate the successful preparation of such samples from five different materials and present the refined lift-out prepar...

A new methodology to parallelize the production of micromechanical test samples from bulk materials is reported. This methodology has been developed to produce samples with typical gage dimensions on the order of 20-200 μm, and also to minimize the reliance on conventional focused ion beam fabrication methods. The fabrication technique uses standard microelectronic process methods such as photo...

Introduction: Argon Ion milling is the basic conventional means used since decades when speaking of sample preparation for TEM analysis. Applied to earth and planetary samples (usually on hand as thin sections) the shortcomings are (a) nearly impossible site specific thinning and (b) only small electron transparent areas obtained. A new technique named FIB (Focused Ion Beam) developed over the ...

In recent years, nanomachining has attracted increasing attention in advanced manufacturing science and technologies as a value-added processes to control material structures, components, devices, and nanoscale systems. To make sub-micro patterns on these products, micro/nanoscale single-crystal diamond cutting tools are essential. Popular non-contact methods for the macro/micro processing of d...