Ion Beam Analysis in the Helium Ion Microscope

(1) Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V., D-01328 Dresden, Germany
(2) Carl-Zeiss-Microscopy GmbH, D-73447 Oberkochen, Germany
Helium ion microscopes (HIM) have turned into a frequently used imaging device in several laboratories around the world. Beside a sub nano-meter resolution and its high field of depth the latest generation of HIM devices (Zeiss Orion NanoFab) offers the ability to make use of Neon ions enabling additional opportunities in terms of surface modifications on the nm scale [1].

While the image generation in a HIM is based on evaluating the amount of secondary electrons the information carried by the back-scattered He/Ne projectiles (BSP) is not taken into consideration at the moment. Thus the HIM offers excellent topographic imaging capabilities but chemical information (in terms of elemental composition) of the surface is not accessible. Nevertheless back-scattered particles carry that information and may be used to provide additional contrast mechanism(s). First attempts to measure BSP energy spectra were done by Sijbrandij et al. [2] and gave evidence for the general feasibility but also revealed that a quantitative chemical analysis of thin layers would require development of more sophisticated detection concepts than those used in their experiments (silicon surface barrier detector).

In the present contribution we show the development and the implementation of a Time-of-Flight back-scattering spectrometry (ToF-BS) technique within our HIM. Pulsing the primary ion beam by using the existing beam blanker with a customized pulsing electronics enables us to generate pulses as short as below 10ns. BSP detection is done by means of a micro channel plate detector.  Our measurements demonstrate that this technique is capable to achieve an energy resolution as good as 2keV (for 30keV He incident ions) by simultaneously keeping the spatial resolution in the order of a few 100nm. We further show that with some slight modification the presented setup can be utilized to acquire ToF spectra of sputtered particles as well, thus enabling lateral resolved ToF-SIMs within the HIM.

[1] G. Hlawacek, V. Veligura, R. van Gastel, and B. Poelsema, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 32(2), 2014, 020801.
[2] S. Sijbrandij, B. Thompson, J. Notte, B. W. Ward and N. P. Economou, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B, 26(6), 2008, 2103-2106