Visualization of microscopic stress fields in silica glass in the scanning electron microscope

Abstract

Quantitative measurements were made in silica glass of highly graded stress fields, as they developed: (i) in the K-dominated zone ahead of the tip of a median-type indentation micro-crack; and, (ii) at a silicon-silica interface of a metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) device. Stress fields could be visualized on a microscopic scale using a field-emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) equipped with a spectrally resolved cathodoluminescence (CL) device, according to piezospectroscopic (PS) assessments. The peculiarity of this newly proposed PS assessment resides in the fact that the performed CL/PS analysis exploited a peculiar luminescence emitted by optically active oxygen point defects in silica glass.

Stress-corrosion mechanisms in silicate glasses

“…The recent development of complementary techniques to measure the crack tip stress fields with nanometric resolution are also very promising for determining the effective scale of a damage process zone. We can cite the SEM cathodo-luminescence measurements (Zhu et al 2007;Pezzotti et al 2008) and the promising measurements by nanoRaman and electron back scattered diffraction techniques (Vaudin et al 2008).…”