High Accuracy and Resolution for the Separation of Nickel Silicide Polymorphs by Improved Analyses of EELS Spectra

Summary

Low loss EELS is a simple method which may be used to discriminate the polymorphs of nickel silicides: however, it has an energy resolution problem because of the instability of the hardware. This problem can be overcome by the use of the well-calibrated plasmon loss peak of Si and zero loss peak as references. We determined the low loss plasmon energies for each polymorph of nickel silicide within 0.1eV. The higher spatial resolution for discriminating three polymorphs of Ni silicide as narrow as 0.5nm can be obtained by using the branching ratio of the core loss EELS spectrum.