Nanoworld up close: STHIM opens new ways to image materials

Do you remember when you first used microscopes at school and marveled at the glorious beauty of tiny samples? Microscopes are fascinating, they reveal structures invisible to the naked eye.

Nowadays, most common microscopes use light to illuminate samples and obtain magnified images, but microscopy is also possible using electrons or ions.

An alternative to conventional imaging

Following a Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) call for proposals, LIST researchers teamed up with researchers in Germany in 2017 to demonstrate the first-ever simultaneous bright-field and dark-field imaging using transmitted helium ions and neutrals.

The two microscope prototypes built in-house offer the opportunity to obtain new contrast modes even from subsurface features and to quantitatively investigate variations in ion transmission and scattering angles with nanoscale lateral resolution.

“Proof of concept demonstrations revealed and confirmed the tremendous potential of using transmitted helium ions in the keV range for imaging. This, combined with the possibility to quantitatively investigate the transmission characteristics pixel-by-pixel at nanoscale, opens the door for advanced experiments in fundamental physics as well as in applications in materials technologies such as in circuit-editing.” explains Santhana Eswara, senior researcher at LIST.

New perspectives coming in

New ways of imaging objects often bring new insights about those objects which were previously inaccessible.

The novel imaging modes developed by LIST and its partners are very promising - they will undoubtedly drive innovation in research and industry, and thus contribute in making a better tomorrow for everyone in our society.