Primary Electron Modeling in the Discharge Chamber of an Ion Engine

Author(s):  
Sudhakar Mahalingam ◽  
James Menart
Author(s):  
Etienne de Harven

Biological ultrastructures have been extensively studied with the scanning electron microscope (SEM) for the past 12 years mainly because this instrument offers accurate and reproducible high resolution images of cell shapes, provided the cells are dried in ways which will spare them the damage which would be caused by air drying. This can be achieved by several techniques among which the critical point drying technique of T. Anderson has been, by far, the most reproducibly successful. Many biologists, however, have been interpreting SEM micrographs in terms of an exclusive secondary electron imaging (SEI) process in which the resolution is primarily limited by the spot size of the primary incident beam. in fact, this is not the case since it appears that high resolution, even on uncoated samples, is probably compromised by the emission of secondary electrons of much more complex origin.When an incident primary electron beam interacts with the surface of most biological samples, a large percentage of the electrons penetrate below the surface of the exposed cells.


Author(s):  
K.-H. Herrmann ◽  
D. Krahl ◽  
H.-P Rust

The high detection quantum efficiency (DQE) is the main requirement for an imagerecording system used in electron microscopy of radiation-sensitive specimens. An electronic TV system of the type shown in Fig. 1 fulfills these conditions and can be used for either analog or digital image storage and processing [1], Several sources of noise may reduce the DQE, and therefore a careful selection of various elements is imperative.The noise of target and of video amplifier can be neglected when the converter stages produce sufficient target electrons per incident primary electron. The required gain depends on the type of the tube and also on the type of the signal processing chosen. For EBS tubes, for example, it exceeds 10. The ideal case, in which all impinging electrons create uniform charge peaks at the target, is not obtainable for several reasons, and these will be discussed as they relate to a system with a scintillator, fiber-optic and photo-cathode combination as the first stage.


Author(s):  
Zhifeng Shao ◽  
A.V. Crewe

For scanning electron microscopes, it is plausible that by lowering the primary electron energy, one can decrease the volume of interaction and improve resolution. As shown by Crewe /1/, at V0 =5kV a 10Å resolution (including non-local effects) is possible. To achieve this, we would need a probe size about 5Å. However, at low voltages, the chromatic aberration becomes the major concern even for field emission sources. In this case, δV/V = 0.1 V/5kV = 2x10-5. As a rough estimate, it has been shown that /2/ the chromatic aberration δC should be less than ⅓ of δ0 the probe size determined by diffraction and spherical aberration in order to neglect its effect. But this did not take into account the distribution of electron energy. We will show that by using a wave optical treatment, the tolerance on the chromatic aberration is much larger than we expected.


Author(s):  
K.-H. Herrmann ◽  
W. D. Rau ◽  
R. Sikeler

Quantitative recording of electron patterns and their rapid conversion into digital information is an outstanding goal which the photoplate fails to solve satisfactorily. For a long time, LLL-TV cameras have been used for EM adjustment but due to their inferior pixel number they were never a real alternative to the photoplate. This situation has changed with the availability of scientific grade slow-scan charged coupled devices (CCD) with pixel numbers exceeding 106, photometric accuracy and, by Peltier cooling, both excellent storage and noise figures previously inaccessible in image detection technology. Again the electron image is converted into a photon image fed to the CCD by some light optical transfer link. Subsequently, some technical solutions are discussed using the detection quantum efficiency (DQE), resolution, pixel number and exposure range as figures of merit.A key quantity is the number of electron-hole pairs released in the CCD sensor by a single primary electron (PE) which can be estimated from the energy deposit ΔE in the scintillator,


Author(s):  
M. T. Postek ◽  
A. E. Vladar

Fully automated or semi-automated scanning electron microscopes (SEM) are now commonly used in semiconductor production and other forms of manufacturing. The industry requires that an automated instrument must be routinely capable of 5 nm resolution (or better) at 1.0 kV accelerating voltage for the measurement of nominal 0.25-0.35 micrometer semiconductor critical dimensions. Testing and proving that the instrument is performing at this level on a day-by-day basis is an industry need and concern which has been the object of a study at NIST and the fundamentals and results are discussed in this paper.In scanning electron microscopy, two of the most important instrument parameters are the size and shape of the primary electron beam and any image taken in a scanning electron microscope is the result of the sample and electron probe interaction. The low frequency changes in the video signal, collected from the sample, contains information about the larger features and the high frequency changes carry information of finer details. The sharper the image, the larger the number of high frequency components making up that image. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) analysis of an SEM image can be employed to provide qualitiative and ultimately quantitative information regarding the SEM image quality.


2008 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 203-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fuminori Kobayashi ◽  
Syuichi Hamano ◽  
Toru Iwao ◽  
Motoshige Yumoto

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