| AVS 63rd International Symposium & Exhibition | |
| Nanometer-scale Science and Technology | Thursday Sessions |
| Session NS+BI-ThA |
| Session: | Applied Nanoscale Microscopy Techniques/Biomaterial Interfaces – New Advances |
| Presenter: | Navid Abedzadeh, MIT |
| Authors: | N. Abedzadeh, MIT C.S. Kim, MIT R.G. Hobbs, MIT K.K. Berggren, MIT |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Electron mirrors have been used in electron microscopy techniques such as low-energy electron microscopy, mirror-corrected scanning electron microscopy and photoemission electron microscopy due to their ability to introduce chromatic and spherical aberrations of arbitrary sign. More recently, a design for a quantum electron microscope (QEM), an imaging approach based on interaction-free measurement, was proposed that could take advantage of an electron mirror whose surface was patterned with a topographic grating. This grating would produce a periodically varying potential close to its surface when a voltage was applied. As a result, the grating would diffract an incident electron plane wave, presenting an opportunity to develop a low-loss electron beam splitter. The diffracted beams produced by such a beam splitter could be used to probe a sample within an electron cavity to achieve an interaction-free measurement. An electron cavity could be formed when another electron mirror is placed slightly behind the back focal plane of the grating mirror. If a sample were placed inside this cavity, repeated weak interactions with the reflected/diffracted electron beam can be used to image the sample while keeping beam-induced sample damage arbitrarily low.
The approach outlined here will be used to characterize diffraction from the patterned mirror surface. Demonstration of electron diffraction from a patterned surface in a FESEM will represent a significant advancement toward the demonstration of a QEM system.