Electrostatic electron mirror in SEM for simultaneous imaging of top and bottom surfaces of a sample

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple electrostatic electron mirror system in SEM that enables simultaneous imaging of both surfaces of a sample, enhancing in-situ SEM capabilities and potentially aiding aberration correction.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, easy-to-implement electrostatic electron mirror setup in SEM for dual-surface imaging, expanding the functionality of conventional SEMs.

Findings

Simultaneous top and bottom surface imaging demonstrated

Analysis of flat vs. concave mirror system effects

Potential for aberration correction without complex beam separators

Abstract

The use of electron mirrors in aberration correction and surface-sensitive microscopy techniques such as low-energy electron microscopy has been established. However, in this work, by implementing an easy to construct, fully electrostatic electron mirror system under a sample in a conventional scanning electron microscope (SEM), we present a new imaging scheme which allows us to form scanned images of the top and bottom surfaces of the sample simultaneously. We believe that this imaging scheme could be of great value to the field of in-situ SEM which has been limited to observation of dynamic changes such as crack propagation and other surface phenomena on one side of samples at a time. We analyze the image properties when using a flat versus a concave electron mirror system and discuss two different regimes of operation. In addition to in-situ SEM, we foresee that our imaging scheme could open up avenues toward spherical aberration correction by the use of electron mirrors in SEMs without the need for complex beam separators.