Virtual Book Launch and Talk – Secondary Electron Energy Spectroscopy in the Scanning Electron Microscope

Date: 18 Nov 2020
Time: 8.00 PM
Venue: Online

The 18^th November 2020 marked the on-line event launch of the book entitled “Secondary Electron Energy Spectroscopy in the Scanning Electron Microscope” by Associate Professor Anjahm Khursheed. He was joined by panellists Dr Cornelia Rodenburg and Dr Filip Mika, moderator Dr Han Weiding and around 70 other participants from various countries such as US, UK, Czech Republic, Italy, Malaysia and Singapore.

A/Prof. Khursheed gave a 30-min opening talk providing an overview of the field of secondary electron energy spectroscopy, and what was to be expected in the book. He highlighted the key techniques and results presented in his book that allowed for the breakthrough in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) material analysis. The talk was followed shortly by a panel discussion with specialists in the field, Dr. Rodenburg of the University of Sheffield and Dr Mika of the Institute of Scientific Instruments, Czech Academy of Sciences. Both panellists are optimistic about the future of the new techniques and the renewed interests in quantitative SEM material analysis.

A 10 minutes Q&A session bookended the event, packed with exciting questions from the participants. In particular, some participants were interested in the potential applications of this technique, in areas such as defect analysis and semiconductor characterization. Prof. Khursheed and panellists share similar optimistic prospects in their replies, pointing towards future experiments to demonstrate the possibility of applying density of state measurements to detect defects and characterize 2D materials.

About the Book

This book will be of interest to all those who use the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) for materials science applications and to SEM development engineers. It highlights the advantages of capturing the energy spectrum of a SEM’s low energy scattered electrons, the ones that are normally used for topographic imaging. The book shows how secondary electron energy spectroscopy can transform the SEM into a powerful analytical tool that can map valuable materials science information on to the Nanoscale: analysing and identifying materials, acquiring bulk valence band density of states information, capturing dopant density distributions in semiconductor specimens, and mapping surface charge distributions. It demonstrates how SE energy spectroscopy has the potential to become a powerful companion to Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (EDS) for low voltage SEM (LVSEM) applications. This book is suitable for Physicists, Chemists, Materials Scientists, advanced graduate students, and scanning electron microscope designers

Prof. Khursheed’s new book can be found here: https://doi.org/10.1142/12010

About the Author and Speaker

Anjam Khursheed is a professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the National University of Singapore. He is also cluster lead of The Metrology Lab @ E6NanoFab. He is a specialist in making new developments for the SEM, and the work reported in this book represents the culmination of four decades of research work in the subject of SE energy spectroscopy in the SEM. Anjam Khursheed obtained his BSC in Electronics and Physics from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1979, and went on to do a PHD there in the subject of Electron Energy Spectrometers for the Scanning Electron Microscope. From 1984 to 1987, he worked as an applied physicist at the High Energy Particle Physics Accelerator organization of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland (1984-7), where he worked on the design of high frequency electromagnetic cavities. He also worked on the subject of atomic clocks at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy (1992-1994). In 1995, Anjam Khursheed went to work at the National University of Singapore

The Expert Panellists

Cornelia Rodenburg (neé Schönjahn) is Senior Lecturer in Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and currently holds an Early Career EPSRC Fellowship during which her group has pioneered secondary hyperspectral imaging (SEHI). Prior to this she was Lecturer and held a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at University of Sheffield. Her first post-doctoral post was at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy. Her work has always been centered on developing a fundamental understanding of materials and systems often requiring innovative electron microscopy in combination with modeling. She has worked on semiconductors, steel, glass and ceramic coatings. Her current main interest is Secondary Electron Hyperspectral Imaging, applied to polymers or complex organic/inorganic materials in order to increase materials reliability or extract key information required for the reverse engineering of natural materials such as spider silk.

Cornelia Rodenburg was one of the first to propose SE energy filtering for in-lens SEMs around 18 years ago, and has recently carried out SE spectral analysis in the Helios NanoLab SEM.

Filip Mika is head of Microscopy and Microanalysis group at the Institute of Scientific Instruments in the Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is an expert in the field of Monte Carlo simulation of the interaction of the beams with matter and signal detection. His skills include secondary electron spectroscopy, very-low-energy and non-charging electron microscopy methods. Filip focuses on imaging of insulators (organic crystals pigments), nano-composites, and dopants in semiconductors. In September 2017, Filip Mika held three day international workshop on the subject of “Energy-Filtered Electron Microscopy” in Brno, Czech Republic, where he promoted the subject of SE energy spectroscopy in the SEM. He has performed SE energy filtering in state-of-the-art in-lens SEMs, such as the Magellan 400 FEG SEM.

The Panel Moderator

Han Weiding is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore. The topic of his PhD thesis was in the subject of SE energy spectroscopy inside the SEM, which he completed in 2019 under the supervision of Anjam Khursheed. Many of the experimental results reported in the book were either obtained by Han Weiding as part of his PhD thesis work, or subsequently as a postdoctoral researcher.

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