Enhanced Resolution of Dislocation Imaging at High Voltages

Abstract

Some results of up to 12 beam contrast calculations for systematic orientations have indicated that high order reflections at high voltages may provide improved dislocation resolution. For example the contrast profiles for dislocations show a decrease in image width for increasing order of reflection (i.e. increasing ḡ·), thus enabling improved resolution of narrow dislocation dissociations and closely spaced dipoles or superdislocations.This paper provides experimental confirmation that high order systematic reflections do indeed result in an improvement in bright field image resolution, e.g. image widths of dislocations can be reduced by a factor of ~3. The results have been obtained from [001] foils of GaAs semiconducting devices in which dislocations are associated with surface and interfacial defects. In each case the crystal is set at the exact Bragg condition for each reflection along the systematic row being used. The work was done on the Berkeley Hitachi microscope operated at 650 kV.