Surface Analysis Using Charged-Particle Beams

Abstract

Publisher Summary The chapter presents the selection of techniques, as far as the selection of techniques is concerned, surface analytical methods in that charged-particle beams are used for signal stimulation— that is, primary beams and also constitute the information carrying signal radiation itself, secondary beam; Auger Electron Spectrometry (AES), ISS, Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy (RBS), Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS), among others, belong to this category, is described. One of the most important capabilities of a surface analytical technique is quantitative elemental analysis— that is, the determination of fractional atomic concentrations of the elements present in the sample surface; generally, the element-specific signal supplied directly by the detection arrangement is not proportional to the element concentration. The chapter discusses the elemental imaging— that is, the determination of the spatial distribution of the elements in a solid sample. The chapter explains with a description of the fundamentals of selected particle-beam techniques divided into electron methods and ion methods, continues with a survey of quantitation methods, and finally deals with the different analytical modes, such as, point analysis, depth profiling, and image and volume analysis. The chapter concludes that the analytical limitations of the two most frequently applied techniques, AES and SIMS, are discussed and it appears that the surface analytical techniques eventually is able to perform three-dimensional quantitative analysis of solids with spatial resolution of 10 nm and much lower than that in the depth-profiling mode for the major elements of a sample.