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A high-throughput approach for cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy sample preparation of thin films



Cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy (XTEM) is a very useful technique to study the interfacial diffusion and reactions and the grain growth of thin films. However, the preparation of XTEM samples of thin films is tedious and challenging. Difficulties may include the delamination of films from the substrate, fracture of brittle substrates and differential milling rates of the substrate and the film. This paper describes an improved technique using a combination of tripod polishing and focused ion beam milling to prepare XTEM samples of thin films. The technique can be widely used for high-throughput production of samples having varying film and substrate properties. Two different geometries are introduced. The first one is suitable for XTEM sample preparation of most films at a high yield rate, but with a limited view area. The other geometry is able to give a larger view area and is more suitable for thicker films. The technique is illustrated by an example of the sample preparation of Fe/Pt multilayer films on SiO2/Si substrates.




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• Powerful electron microscope zooms in at Monash - The Age

The Age
Powerful electron microscope zooms in at Monash
The Age, Australia - Dec 10, 2008
Photo: Joe Armao ONE of the world's most powerful microscopes, capable of illuminating atomic structures, has been unveiled at Monash University's Clayton ...
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• A UV-Erasable Stacked Diode-Switch Organic Nonvolatile Bistable Memory on Plastic Substrates
In this letter, we demonstrate a robust and stacked diode-switch organic nonvolatile bistable memory (DS-ONBM) using polymer-chain-stabilized gold nanoparticles on a plastic substrate in ambient air. The absorption spectrum of the gold nanoparticles shows ultraviolet (UV) absorption. Therefore, UV light is used to erase data in the DS-ONBM. The data in the memory can be retained for more than ten days in the air. The estimated retention time is nearly a year. This DS-ONBM is demonstrated to read, write, and retain the data and is reusable by UV-light illumination. Hence, the UV-erasable DS-ONBM is fully applicable in printed electronics such as RFID tags.
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• Falls Church can be a hip place

Even though it's always dangerous for me to go out alone under any circumstance, I sometimes am able to leave my electronic cloister and take a walk downtown on a particularly beautiful sunny Saturday afternoon, as I did yesterday. I need to do more physical activity for my health, so I took the risk. I was able to walk about a half a mile, which is at least something. One of my destinations was, naturally, a coffee house.

Stacy's Coffee Parlor has been around for a few years now. It's in a somewhat rundown shopping area which has not yet experienced the axe of "renewal," though new construction is going on all around it. Unlike the big corporate coffee giant, Stacy's is unique and independent, and it is like a bit of college town atmosphere in this otherwise businesslike suburb. This Saturday it was mostly empty, except for a group of science fiction and fantasy fans who were meeting there for entertaining conversation about weird science.

As a sketch artist, I need to keep up my sophisticated status. And sketch artists who are in the cool zone have Moleskine sketchbooks. They are prohibitively expensive, which is why I hadn't gotten one before now. But I was able to get one on sale so it was now in my backpack. But it was also sketch-free and unused. I was too nervous to draw in it. What if I did a wretched drawing on one of these precious pages? Especially the first drawing! My Moleskine drawings have to be super-good to justify my use of such a status symbol.

Since coffee houses are familiar territory, I decided to do a coffee house drawing on the first page of the Moleskine. This took me about an hour, while I sipped coffee or water and heard bits and pieces of the conversation. The drawing, thank goodness, looked all right, and my perspective was pretty good. And then after a while the science fiction fans discovered me and my drawing. They were impressed by it and even more, they wanted copies, which they were willing to pay for! I made a deal and they will get 15 copies for them to give each other as presents. So my Moleskine has an auspicious beginning.

Pen and marker drawing on Moleskine. The yellow color is the "natural" color of the sketchbook page.
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• Plasmonic Laser Antennas and Related Devices
This paper reviews recent work on device applications of optical antennas. Localized surface plasmon resonances of gold nanorod antennas resting on a silica glass substrate were modeled by finite difference time-domain simulations. A single gold nanorod of length 150 or 550 nm resonantly generates enhanced near fields when illuminated with light of 830 nm wavelength. A pair of these nanorods gives higher field enhancements due to capacitive coupling between them. Bowtie antennas that consist of a pair of triangular gold particles offer the best near-field confinement and enhancement. Plasmonic laser antennas based on the coupled nanorod antenna design were fabricated by focused ion beam lithography on the facet of a semiconductor laser diode operating at a wavelength of 830 nm. An optical spot size of few tens of nanometers was measured by apertureless near-field optical microscope. We have extended our work on plasmonic antenna into mid-infrared (mid-IR) wavelengths by implementing resonant nanorod and bowtie antennas on the facets of various quantum cascade lasers. Experiments show that this mid-IR device can provide an optical intensity confinement 70 times higher than that would be achieved with diffraction limited optics. Near-field intensities $sim$$1;{rm GW/cm}^2$ were estimated for both near-infrared and mid-IR plasmonic antennas. A fiber device that takes advantage of plasmonic resonances of gold nanorod arrays providing a high density of optical “hot spots” is proposed. Results of a systematic theoretical and experimental study of the reflection spectra of these arrays fabricated on a silica glass substrate are also presented. The family of these proof-of-concept plasmonic devices that we present here can be potentially useful in many applications including near-field optical microscopes, high-density optical data storage, surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy, heat-assisted magneti- - c recording, and spatially resolved absorption spectroscopy.
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• Quantum computing spins closer
The promise of quantum computing is that it will dramatically outshine traditional computers in tackling certain key problems: searching large databases, factoring large numbers, creating uncrackable codes and simulating the atomic structure of materials. (2008-11-24)
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