Fitting a Focussed Ion Beam / Scanning Electron Microscope (FIB/SEM) with a micromanipulators as well as a range of plug-in tools transforms the microscope from a device purely used for observation to a workstation where materials can be manipulated, assembled, characterized, etc. – at the micron, sub-micron, and nano scale.
Typical applications include harvesting, arranging, and mechanically testing nanowires, nano tubes, and CNTs. It is also often of great interest to characterize nanowires, nanotubes, CNTs, etc. electrically.
Electrical and mechanical tests as well as structural investigations on MEMS devices are also commonly performed tasks.
This work will present a number of different experiments performed inside SEM or FIB/SEM tools. Among these are pick and place operations on sub-micron sized particles, mechanical testing of nanowires and CNTs as well as in situ thermal experiments.
One of the described experiments entails mounting a strand of CNTs to a force measurement cantilever inside an SEM and subsequently performing a tensile experiment on the strand of CNTs. The CNTs are mounted to the force measurement cantilever using a special vacuum compatible adhesive. The adhesive can be applied in situ using a fine tip on the end of a micromanipulator. The tip is dipped into a small droplet of the adhesive in order to wet it. Next, some adhesive is transferred to the force measurement cantilever. In an additional step, some adhesive is used to extract a strand of CNTs from a large bundle. The extracted CNTs are brought into contact to the wetted force measurement cantilever and the adhesive is cured using the electron beam. Finally, the a force measurement is performed revealing the CNTs tensile strength.
Figures:
Assembling an STM tip. Courtesy of L. de Knoop et al., CEMES-CNRS, France.
Force measurement on thin film substrate.
Electrical characterization of a nanowire.
To cite this abstract:
Andrew Jonathan Smith, Andreas Rummel, Klaus Schock, Stephan Kleindiek; A NanoWorkshop Toolkit for in situ Nanoassembly and Nanocharacterization. The 16th European Microscopy Congress, Lyon, France. https://emc-proceedings.com/abstract/a-nanoworkshop-toolkit-for-in-situ-nanoassembly-and-nanocharacterization/. Accessed: December 3, 2023« Back to The 16th European Microscopy Congress 2016
EMC Abstracts - https://emc-proceedings.com/abstract/a-nanoworkshop-toolkit-for-in-situ-nanoassembly-and-nanocharacterization/