Comparing Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) and Tomographic Atom Probe (TAP) through Measurements of Thin Multilayers

Abstract

While transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is well established, the tomographic atom probe (TAP) is a rather new instrument for three-dimensional analysis of structures at the nanometre scale. The TAP has been developed from the field ion microscopy (FIM) that is used to obtain information about the crystalline structure of sharp (<50 nm tip radius) metal tips, by attaching a spatial detector and performing time of flight measurements. This allows the chemical analysis of individual atoms extracted from the tip, resulting in a complete chemical analysis over the whole volume [1]. To determine the accuracy and reliability of both methods for sub-nanometre chemical analysis of the interface between the layers of film systems we compare their respective results.