Electron Microscope Specimen Preparation Techniques in Materials Science

Twin‐jet electropolishing for damage‐free transmission electron microscopy specimen preparation of metallic microwires

“…As a rule of thumb, polishing with abrasive papers can produce a depth of damage to the material up to three times the size of the abrasive particles (Ayache, Beaunier, Boumendil, Ehret, & Laub, 2010). The polishing steps should be carried out in a way that after the last polishing the sample is slightly thicker than twice the damage penetration depth of the last polishing step so that the central part of the material is unaffected (Thompson‐Russell & Edington, 1977). After achieving the final thickness, the disc should be rinsed in acetone to completely remove the remaining adhesive.…”

Preparation Techniques for Transmission Electron Microscopy

“…Usually one hole is made, preferably in the middle of the 3 mm diameter disc; the thin area is around the edges of this hole. Recipes for chemical and electrochemical thinning for many materials can be found in electron microscopy textbooks [38,39,42,43] as well as in handbooks of chemistry. Some solvents of general use for electropolishing are listed by Rainforth and Tholkn [44].…”

“…The thinning process is rather aggressive, and the technique used for this process must be chosen so as to exclude artifacts. In particular, unstable or metastable structures can easily change, and chemically complex materials can be damaged due to the preferential loss of one or more of their components [36,39].…”

New fast chemically assisted ion beam etching (CAIBE) technique for preparation of TEM specimen from silicon

“…semiconductors to study structures at atomic level. Considerable efforts have been made to optimize the techniques for TEM specimen preparation [1][2][3][4][5] and at present majority of TEM specimens in materials science are prepared by reducing the initial thickness to 30-50 pm by mechanical polishing and final thinning is done by inert ion beam etching (IBE) at a shallow angle of beam incidence. Though it is possible to obtain satisfactory specimens by inert ion beam etching, some inherent problems exist e.g.…”