ADVANCES IN EBSD HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE, ENABLING EFFICIENT LOW KV ANALYSIS FOR HIGH SPATIAL RESOLUTION AND BEAM SENSITIVE MATERIALS

摘要

It has been demonstrated that reducing the accelerating voltage dramatically improves spatial resolution with the most significant gain below 10 kV (Fig. 3). This comes about by the corresponding reduction in the subsurface interaction volume, giving rise to a smaller 'footprint' from which diffracted electrons created at the surface can escape. However, the Kikuchi band width increases with decreasing voltage (Fig. 4), with implications for band detection and subsequent indexing. Further the EBSP intensity, contrast and sharpness all suffer with reducing accelerating voltage (Fig. 5). Improvements to the sensitivity of the system allow low beam current to be used, and the ability to successfully detect the bands and to correctly index low quality EBSPs has been shown with step sizes of 20 nm for tungsten carbide, (successfully resolving three phases, Fig. 6) and 5 nm (Fig. 7) on nano-structured nickel.