Characteristics of low energy electron beam from electron beam microcolumn aligned by STM

Abstract

We constructed an Electron Beam Microcolumn (EBM) aligned by STM using silicon microfabricated electrostatic lenses. The system consists of an STM aligned field emitter, an extractor, an accelerator, a beam dump, a quadrupole deflector and an einzel lens. The system can be operated with the primary beam voltage from 0.2 to 1 kV, resulting in a sample current of 1 nA and the beam diameter of similar to 0.3 mu m when a sample was placed less than 2 mm away from the exiting einzel lens. The electron beam emission pattern was tested while aligning the tip to the hole of the lens and focusing the electron beam, revealing Fowler-Nordheim type I-V dependence and 1/f dominated noise.