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Plasma cleaning
30 seconds consecutive cleaning on the same area
Quantfoil R 1.2/1.3
0.35
0.30
0.25
0.20
0.15
FIGURE 2.
carbon film
0.10 Film thickness
(multiplied by
0.05
film mean free path)
broken as a function of
0.00 plasma cleaning
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
time.
Time (seconds)
*
270s
450s
a.u. *
FIGURE 3.
determined as 15.7 nm/min. With the shield, EELS was performed on an amorphous carbon
this rate decreased to 2.6 nm/min. In practical film at selected times of plasma cleaning with the
terms, the shield expanded the time window for shield to determine any change of structure of the
plasma cleaning from less than 2 to more than 10 film as it was slowly thinned. The carbon K-edge
minutes. spectrum (above 285 eV of energy loss) shows the
When a support film was cleaned for transition from the 1s occupied electronic state to
30seconds in consecutive steps and analyzed, the unoccupied states above the Fermi level.
electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) data was The first two peaks represent the transitions
generated as shown in Figure2. The experiment to the * and * unoccupied states. These proved
was ended when the support film was observed to constant as Figure 3 shows. The structure of the
rupture in the FEI CM30 transmission electron film is unchanged when plasma cleaned, while no
microscope. Using a value of 110 nm for the contamination during imaging indicates effective
inelastic mean free path (MFP) for carbon at plasma cleaning.
200 kV, the degradation rate for the carbon film
is 7.9 nm/min. After 6 minutes (360 seconds) of
plasma cleaning, the film could still be imaged and 1
Courtesy of A. L. Hamon, B. Willems, D. Schryvers,
without recontamination. EMAT, University of Antwerp, RUCA.