Electron beam nanofabrication of ferromagnetic nanostructures in TEM

摘要

Electron beam (e-beam) fabrication of nanostructures by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is rapidly developing into a top-down nanofabrication method for the sub-5 nm fabrication of structures that cannot usually be realised using resist based lithographic techniques or by the focused ion beam patterning methods. We describe the usage of a variety of e-beam shapes, including point and elliptical line focus, as well as a comparison of LaB₆ and field-emission guns (FEGs), to achieve versatile sculpting of nanodot arrays, nanobridges and nanotips. We operate our patterning on free-standing nickel (Ni) thin film laterally connected to a silicon (Si) substrate as well as to free-standing Ni nanotips, where we achieve a novel three-dimensional (3D) nano-sculpting methodology.