Abstract
Electron beams (e-beams) have been applied as detecting probes and clean energy sources in many applications. In this work, we investigated several approaches for measurement and estimation of the range and distribution of local temperatures on a subject surface under irradiation of nano-microscale e-beams. We showed that a high-intensity e-beam with current density of 105-6 A/cm2 could result in vaporization of solid Si and Au materials in seconds, with a local surface temperature higher than 3000 K. With a lower beam intensity to 103-4 A/cm2, e-beams could introduce local surface temperature in the range of 1000–2000 K shortly, causing local melting in metallic nanowires and Cr, Pt, and Pd thin films, and phase transition in metallic Mg-B films. We demonstrated that thin film thermocouples on a freestanding Si3N4 window were capable of detecting peaked local surface temperatures up to 2000 K and stable, and temperatures in a lower range with a high precision. We discussed the distribution of surface temperatures under e-beams, thermal dissipation of thick substrate, and a small converting ratio from the high kinetic energy of e-beam to the surface heat. The results may offer some clues for novel applications of e-beams.
Highlights
E-beams have been applied as probes and clean energy sources in a variety of practical applications, such as imaging surface morphology, analyzing crystalline structures, producing lithography patterns, depositing thin films, etc
We first invested the up-limit of the local temperature, Tmax, that a nanoscale e-beam in a Transmission electron microscope (TEM) could induce on a subject surface
Dozens of experimental evidences showed that atoms in surface layers of a solid NWs could be instantly vaporized under irradiation of a high-intensity e-beam (HIEB) [8, 42], indicating that the corresponding Tmax values were higher than the vaporization temperatures of the subject materials
Summary
E-beams have been applied as probes and clean energy sources in a variety of practical applications, such as imaging surface morphology, analyzing crystalline structures, producing lithography patterns, depositing thin films, etc. By analyzing the structure change of the material before and after the irradiation, and by directly measuring the local temperature with devices and measurement techniques we developed [39, 40], we analyzed the heating effects induced with nanoscale e-beams for a temperature range of six orders of magnitudes with in situ experiments in TEM and SEM.
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