No Arabic abstract
Transmission electron microscopy has become a major characterisation tool with an ever increasing variety of methods being applied in wide range of scientific fields. However, the probably most famous pitfall in related workflows is the preparation of high-quality electron-transparent lamellae enabling for extraction of valuable and reliable information. Particularly in the field of solid state physics and materials science, it is often required to study the surface of a macroscopic specimen with plan-view orientation. Nevertheless, despite tremendous advances in instrumentation, i.e. focused ion beam, the yield of existing plan-view lamellae preparation techniques is relatively low compared to cross-sectional extraction methods. Furthermore, techniques relying on mechanical treatments, i.e. conventional preparation, compromise site-specifity. In this paper, we demonstrate that by combining a mechanical grinding step prior to backside lift-out in the focused ion beam plan-view lamellae preparation becomes increasingly easy. The suggested strategy combines site-specifity with micrometer precision as well as possible investigation of pristine surfaces with a field of view of several hundred square micrometers.
Layered materials (LMs) are at the centre of an ever increasing research effort due to their potential use in a variety of applications. The presence of imperfections, such as bi- or multilayer areas, holes, grain boundaries, isotropic and anisotropic deformations, etc. are detrimental for most (opto)electronic applications. Here, we present a set-up able to transform a conventional scanning electron microscope into a tool for structural analysis of a wide range of LMs. An hybrid pixel electron detector below the sample makes it possible to record two dimensional (2d) diffraction patterns for every probe position on the sample surface (2d), in transmission mode, thus performing a 2d+2d=4d STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) analysis. This offers a field of view up to 2 mm2, while providing spatial resolution in the nm range, enabling the collection of statistical data on grain size, relative orientation angle, bilayer stacking, strain, etc. which can be mined through automated open-source data analysis software. We demonstrate this approach by analyzing a variety of LMs, such as mono- and multi-layer graphene, graphene oxide and MoS2, showing the ability of this method to characterize them in the tens of nm to mm scale. This wide field of view range and the resulting statistical information are key for large scale applications of LMs.
In photoelectron spectroscopy, the measured electron momentum range is intrinsically related to the excitation photon energy. Low photon energies $<10$ eV are commonly encountered in laser-based photoemission and lead to a momentum range that is smaller than the Brillouin zones of most materials. This can become a limiting factor when studying condensed matter with laser-based photoemission. An additional restriction is introduced by widely used hemispherical analyzers that record only electrons photoemitted in a solid angle set by the aperture size at the analyzer entrance. Here, we present an upgrade to increase the effective solid angle that is measured with a hemispherical analyzer. We achieve this by accelerating the photoelectrons towards the analyzer with an electric field that is generated by a bias voltage on the sample. Our experimental geometry is comparable to a parallel plate capacitor and, therefore, we approximate the electric field to be uniform along the photoelectron trajectory. With this assumption, we developed an analytic, parameter-free model that relates the measured angles to the electron momenta in the solid and verify its validity by comparing with experimental results on the charge density wave material TbTe$_3$. By providing a larger field of view in momentum space, our approach using a bias potential considerably expands the flexibility of laser-based photoemission setups.
GAW, acronym for Gamma Air Watch, is a Research and Development experiment in the TeV range, whose main goal is to explore the feasibility of large field of view Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes. GAW is an array of three relatively small telescopes (2.13 m diameter) which differs from the existing and presently planned projects in two main features: the adoption of a refractive optics system as light collector and the use of single photoelectron counting as detector working mode. The optics system allows to achieve a large field of view (24x24 squared degrees) suitable for surveys of large sky regions. The single photoelectron counting mode in comparison with the charge integration mode improves the sensitivity by permitting also the reconstruction of events with a small number of collected Cherenkov photons. GAW, which is a collaboration effort of Research Institutes in Italy, Portugal and Spain, will be erected in the Calar Alto Observatory (Sierra de Los Filabres - Andalucia, Spain), at 2150 m a.s.l.). The first telescope will be settled within Autumn 2007. This paper shows the main characteristics of the experiment and its expected performance.
Two-dimensional (2D) materials family with its many members and different properties has recently drawn great attention. Thanks to their atomic thickness and smooth surface, 2D materials can be constructed into heterostructures or homostructures in the fashion of out-of-plane perpendicular stacking or in-plane lateral stitching, resulting in unexpected physical and chemical properties and applications in many areas. In particular, 2D metal-semiconductor heterostructures or homostructures (MSHSs) which integrate 2D metals and 2D semiconductors, have shown great promise in future integrated electronics and energy-related applications. In this review, MSHSs with different structures and dimensionalities are first introduced, followed by several ways to prepare them. Their applications in electronics and optoelectronics, energy storage and conversion, and their use as platforms to exploit new physics are then discussed. Finally, we give our perspectives about the challenges and future research directions in this emerging field.
A side-fed crossed Dragone telescope provides a wide field-of-view. This type of a telescope is commonly employed in the measurement of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization, which requires an image-space telecentric telescope with a large focal plane over broadband coverage. We report the design of the wide field-of-view crossed Dragone optical system using the anamorphic aspherical surfaces with correction terms up to the 10th order. We achieved the Strehl ratio larger than 0.95 over 32 by 18 square degrees at 150 GHz. This design is an image-space telecentric and fully diffraction-limited system below 400 GHz. We discuss the optical performance in the uniformity of the axially symmetric point spread function and telecentricity over the field-of-view. We also address the analysis to evaluate the polarization properties, including the instrumental polarization, extinction rate, and polarization angle rotation. This work is a part of programs to design a compact multi-color wide field-of-view telescope for LiteBIRD, which is a next generation CMB polarization satellite.